Have you been thinking of getting PHP Certified? Wondering how it will help your career and what benefits will it bring you? A few months ago, César Bruschi Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE) conducted an open poll on the LinkedIn group and asked the group, “What are the real advantages of PHP Certification for you? I found it interesting that he said, “I’m learning a lot about PHP just while I was preparing for the exam.”

Of course, there are many benefits that ZCEs see, new job offers, salary increases, promotions, and an overall increase in your reputation. In the “Benefits of ZCE” questionnaire, there were ZCEs who gave feedback from their personal experiences. One of my favorite comments to the survey came from Yahoo Software Development Engineer Jorge Garcia!

“I personally can say that it helped me advance in my career. I passed the exam in ZendCon 2013 in October 2013 and 5 months later I started working at Yahoo as a php developer. If we consider the applications and resumes that Yahoo receives every day; of this logo and certificate; I’m sure it helped me stand out from the crowd. So, it was definitely worth it. Of course, I also had to go through a meticulous interview process.”

Jorge Garcia, Yahoo! Software Development Engineer

Some experts; He thinks that a focused certificate may be better than a university degree, depending on your goals and career aspirations. The Salary Survey report in The Certification Magazine’s February 2014 issue contained some interesting information about how employers look at certified employees.

Employers have money to give skilled tech workers, and if you have a certificate that validates your skills, you have an excellent chance to get a larger share of that money.

It is difficult to directly correlate an individual’s salary with his certificate and measure exactly how much, but we can at least make a strong correlation: about 90 percent of the salary survey respondents have one or more valid certificates. The impact may be large or small, but having a certificate is a factor in paying you money.

Having a certificate can also affect your promotion, and there is some evidence in this direction in the salary survey. Approximately 22 percent of respondents say they received a promotion within the year after they received certification, and about half of them believe their certificates played a role in getting promotions.

While this is a more general certification survey, the results are in perfect harmony with what we saw in the ZCE survey results.

Additional benefits of Zend certification: Discounted tickets to PHP Conferences such as ZendCon; Membership to the ZCE LinkedIn group; Participation in the ZCE Directory list; Custom ZCE Logo to add to your resume / CV; Permanent copy of Zend Studio and one year free license for Zend Server (on request).

If you are ready to take this step and get a certificate of PHP, now is the time to accelerate your career! If you think you need help preparing, Zend has tools to help you.

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