LWM: When and why did you decide to get your employees Zend certified?
GS: Two reasons:

1. To demonstrate to our employees that we are committed to their continued growth and professional development. Achieving a certification regardless of the particular technology area helps to build a sense of confidence and provides the employee with a tangible accomplishment that he can take with him should he decide to leave.
2. To demonstrate to our clients and our non-development employees that our development team has the skills and abilities required to support them. It's difficult for non-technical people to really understand whether a particular programmer knows what he's doing or not, particularly when working in the context of a large and growing team. Certifications help to demonstrate competence.

LWM: How would you rate it in comparison to other certification programs that you have sponsored employees for in the past?
GS: The Zend certification is the first certification program that Direct Response Technologies has formally supported. In past roles, I've had members of my team seek other certifications like the Novell CNE or Microsoft or Red Hat certifications. Those certifications comprise more than a single test and are more difficult to attain. Zend certification is a single test that takes less than an hour to complete. It certainly helps having some real-world PHP development experience prior to preparing for the test. However, it is just a single test.

LWM: Would you as a company/manager do it again? Future hires?
GS: Yes, we'll certainly continue to support certification. In fact two team members took and passed the exam last week and all future team members will know from the start that they will be expected to achieve the same goal. We're also going encourage all of our team members to achieve the MySQL professional certification.

LWM: What were the employees' thoughts on getting certified?
GS: The members of the team were universally excited about the certification. They all studied hard, coached each other, and many scheduled their exams for the same day. Not a single member of the team expressed any reservations. Some of the team members who took the test later in the process expressed some nervousness over the results not wanting to get shown up by their peers but were nonetheless excited to participate.

LWM: What were some of the comments about the exam itself (easy/hard)?
GS: Most found the test acceptably challenging. There were some comments about some of the questions being outside of the scope of PHP development. However, those questions were relevant to the skills being tested.

To complete the puzzle, we wanted to get insight from a current ZCE on his/her experience after getting this certification. For this we turned to Marcus Whitney, chief Architect of MyEmma.com. He offered us this insight on why he believed it was so important for him to get his ZCE:

LWM: Could you tell me about your work/development environment and why the Zend certification was important?
MW: It was important to establish a standard here for new employees that we only hire the best PHP professionals. I couldn't demand others be ZCEs if I wasn't one myself.

LWM: How long have you had certification, and why did you decide to get it?
MW: I got it in September 2004. I got it because it was a stamp of approval to my peers at the PHP|Works conference.

LWM: How would you rate it compared to other certifications that you've gotten in the past?
MW: I've only done BrainBench certs in the past. Being in Open Source, I see the ever-increasing role that certifications are playing, but when I got into the industry they just weren't as relevant.

LWM: As a manager, are you considering making it part of your company policy for your current developers? Future hires?
MW: Yes, absolutely.

LWM: What were some comments about the exam itself (easy/hard)?
MW: The test is not simple. Many PHP programmers use PEAR and third-party libraries.

LWM: Do you have plans to get any other LAMP-related certifications?
MW: I think so... but I'm not sure which ones at the moment. I'm thinking MySQL is probably next for me.

After doing the interviews, it appears that the ZCE is gaining clout in the corporate world. In the last few months, we at HotLinuxJobs have started seeing corporations ask for the ZCE; as a result, it's become a focus of a number of our searches. With the increased use of PHP in the enterprise, the ZCE has positioned itself for a bright future.