Magento 2 Certification Online: personal experience

On 1st March 2018, Magento launched a new certification Magento 2 Certified Professional Developer. I had been waiting for this certification for a year or so. Now I understand that the exam would be more difficult a year ago. I would have to rely on luck to pass the exam without knowledge and experience I received during last year. So now I want to share with you my personal experience and try to make up some kind of magento certification guide. I hope you will find my experience useful and get an answer for how to get magento certification.

Registration for the Exam

On the same day, I decided to register for the certification exam, so as not to postpone it for an indefinite time and force myself to face it soon. First of all, I bought a voucher at Magento U. The voucher costs $260 and it provides you with a voucher code.

On the certification page, I clicked the button “Find a Testing Center and register for Exam” and I was redirected to Webassessor page with the button Register for a new examination.

Far in 2012, I passed an exam for Magento 1 developer certification. The closest certification center is 3 hours driving from my city. Last time it took a day to drive forward, pass the exam and drive back. So it was really a surprise to see besides an option Onsite Proctored a new option Online. Huge thank for this option to Magento team.

So I proceed with an Online option. The next thing to do is to choose a date and time, and timezone. There were only America timezones available. I checked my availability and added a few days to learn a bit more theory. Finally, I chose 13th of March, also, as I’m located in Europe so I selected America/New_York timezone and 10:00 am which would be 4:00 pm my end.

Environment and software preparation

The examination process is provided by Kryterion. Kryterion has a detailed list of the preconditions for each test taker to prepare for the exam. The first thing was to find some location where no one would disturb me during the exam. Also, this place should satisfy conditions from the list. The office didn’t work well for me because at the office I use Ubuntu and I have two displays. I decided to take an examination from home. I have a PC with one screen, Windows 10 with installed Adobe Flash, webcam with built-in microphone, and good internet connection. There is an online tool by Kryterion to check internet connection speed :

When I went back to the Webassessor page, there were 2 steps to complete in order to be able to launch an exam when scheduled time comes.

First, I had to install the Sentinel Secure Application. This software takes full control of OS so you can’t switch or open any other application while passing an exam. The second step was to create Biometric Profile. It is using for identification. The process of setting profile suppose to be a simple one but it appeared to me as a real challenge and here is why:

At first, system captured face via webcam and it worked well. After that, the system asked to type my name around 5-6 times to capture the rhythm of typing. After system fixed my rhythm of typing, it asked me to log into by typing my name again. It seems I entered my name hundreds of times and I couldn’t go through rhythm validation. Whatever type speed I tried, it always returned me an error message “Rhythm of typing doesn’t match”. After half of hour of attempts, I rebooted my PC and started creating Biometric Profile again. My name (Rostyslav Sabishchenko) is quite a long one and it appeared that system fixed such rhythm which I couldn’t reproduce. I decided to type one symbol per one second to keep the same gradual pace. It worked perfectly.

Examination time

On 13th of March, at 3:30 pm I cleaned my desk from not allowed stuff like books, phone, tablet, laptop, I locked the door in the room and I waited. 10 minutes before the scheduled time the “Launch” button appeared and I clicked it. As before my PC was locked down with the Sentinel. After successfully typing my name as before, there were a few things such as an introduction page and agreements to accept.

The exam started, countdown timer launched and I initiated working through questions and answers. After 5 minutes the exam paused and a window was changed to an area with chat and a webcam preview. An operator asked me to adjust the webcam in the way that she/he would see a whole keyboard and a mouse, my hands and face. It took 3 minutes and the exam continued. After 60 minutes of the exam, my kid asked me something from outside of the room and I answered with a couple of words. At the time the exam was paused and there was a message about ban the talks during an examination. I confirmed and continued.

It took 80 minutes for me to go through all questions. After that, I thought a bit more about the questions I marked for review during the examination. Then, I clicked Finish button there was a double confirmation that I wanted that. After finishing the examination I could see my results. It appeared as Overall Score percentage as well as a percentage for each group of questions and mainly with a final result - PASS. On the next day, I received an email from Magento that my Magento Account was updated with the test results and a Magento Certified Profile page was created for me.

Conclusion

Despite the issue I faced with setting Biometric Profile, online magento certification was a really good experience. For me personally, this option saved me almost a day. I will recommend this way of certification to other developers and it’ll definitely be my preferable way of taking other exams if the online option is available.