How many hours could it take to prepare for PHP 7 certification exam?

[McLaren]

Hello,

I have about 5 years proffessional experience with PHP. I will try to apply for new jobs soon. But I was considering - maybe I should get the certification so they would believe my skills more.

I myself understand that it does not bring much value to the business, because what I need, I already know, or can find on the internet.

But to prepare for certification, I will need to learn lot of useless stuff.

Maybe some of you have tracked hours and can give some information - how long did it take? Also you could tell how long have you worked with php before learning for exam.

I hope it does not take super huge amount of hours. If I could prepare for it in 80 hours, that would be good. But I am not sure if I want if it would take 500 hours.

Of course every person is different and learning time vary, but I would still get an idea.

[Dani]

I guess, if I were you, I would start by getting my hands on a sample exam. Take the full exam, time yourself, and see how well you do. If you do okay and are confident you can repeat the results in a testing center, then the amount of studying time required was the amount of time it took you to take the exam. Otherwise, you'll know what parts to focus on and where you're weak.

[McLaren]

actually now searched for sample php7 exam, and did not find. Then searched for php 7 certification, so far also did not find. Is it not existing yet?

Then I guess I do not want to get certified for php 5 when soon it should be php 7.

[jkon]

We have no real idea how well you know PHP so any attempt to calculate how many hours (days or weeks) you would need for a PHP 7 test would be just a lucky guess. If you know PHP 5.3 + (in a structural way that you can accomplish any demand you have) then moving to PHP 7 is not big deal. In what organization do you intend to get a certification after all? Have they announced when they will have a PHP 7 certification ?

From the employer point of view I put very little to none appreciation in those certification. It is good to be there but notice that those tests include also “goto” “:procedural” and “traits” or many more “features”. You should have a strong portfolio , a strong freewares account and an attitude that will prove not only that you can play but also that you can play nice with others as well.

The few jobs I applied for were not interested in certifications, most of which are "dubious", but a portfolio of webapps/sites and a strong SO presence. SO was very high on their list. I don't interact much with it, so fared badly - there may have been other issues too - but I scored high on practical competence / code test - but feedback quoted this SO issue. GitHub was also quoted as being an important repo that could be checked out. There are a limited number of 5.6 to 7 additions and deprecations - so as jkon states, there shouldn't be a huge jump.