Are Java8 certifications still relevant?

[Girish Bal]

Are Java8 certifications still relevant? Java 10 is out now and 11 is coming soon. With Java releases happening every 6 months, how are the certfications going to keep up?

[Campbell Ritchie]

Girish Bal wrote:Are Java8 certifications still relevant? . . .

Are there any Java9/10 exams available yet? I didn't find any on he Oracle websie. I would have thought J8 is still up to date.

With Java releases happening every 6 months, how are the certfications going to keep up?

Good question. Don't know. Maybe there will only be exams for the LTS versions.

[Pete Letkeman]

The knowledge gained by preparing for a Java 8 certification will still be relevant and helpful to many Java programmers even if they are a newer version of Java.

Roel De Nijs wrote: If you are a Java greenhorn, you'll definitely benefit from preparing for this certification. Your Java knowledge will definitely increase and you'll get a solid understanding of Java and OO basics. If you already have (some) Java experience, you might learn a few new things but the biggest value will be taking the OCPJP certification exam and becoming Oracle Certified Professional, Java SE 8 Programmer. And this certification lets you take any other Java certification (from Oracle).
One of my former colleagues was an experienced developer (+15 years as a VB6 and .Net developer) but had very limited Java experience. So after she prepared and passed the OCAJP7 certification exam, her Java knowledge had drastically improved.

https://coderanch.com/t/683282/certification/Recognition-certs#3206249

Girish Bal wrote:how are the certfications going to keep up?

In the past it has taken more then a few months after a Java release before any certifications were made available as noted here https://coderanch.com/t/683060/certification/prologue#3255021
Oracle has yet to announce any new certification exams for Java.

I suspect that some shops are still heavily invested in Java 8 and for whatever reason they have not or can not upgrade to newer versions of Java.
If you are an Android programmer you are most likely using Java 8 or older versions of Java (unless you are using Kotlin).

[Prasad Saya]

Girish Bal wrote:Are Java8 certifications still relevant?...

One gets to learn programming using lambdas, stream and new time APIs.

[William Ng]

Due to the expensiveness of upgrading legacy code bases, there are still way more projects that still use versions of Java older that version 8. I bet it will still be relevant for sometime. The versions are just updates that provide new features, but there is nothing that prohibits a developer from using older versions. Besides like I said, they are just extensions. If you know Java 1, than you would probably know a good chunk of version 8 already, and it only gets higher the more recent the version.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Also, Java 8 is still the most frequent long term support release. So in big companies, it is the most popular version. In fact, some companies are upgrading from Java 7 to 8 right now!

tip: Just write OCA/OCP on your resume rather than the version number. That way people who aren't familiar with the cert don't wonder why you are listing Java X on your resume.