How to become a EPiServer Ceritified Developer

November 30, 2008 | 11 comments

I would like to congratulate Mikael Lundin to becoming a Certified EPiServer Developer. He writes about this experience in his blog with some tips about what you should study. I would like to complement what he has written with some of the tips I give to my students who are going to take the certification.

About the EPiServer Certification

You have two hours to complete around 70 multiple choice questions. You can skip a question during exam and go back to it later but you can not change answered questions.  To pass, you need answer correct on 60% of the questions.

My tips for passing the test

Preparing yourself is a must because the the goal of the test is to separate those who have worked with EPiServer from those who have not. But working with EPiServer is not enough, you must also have a good understanding of all features availible in EPiServer, even those you have not used…

  • Do develop with EPiServer for a while before you take the test. I do not think many have passed the certification directly after completing the basic developer training.
  • Do check EPiServer’s list of Knowledge Areas you are going to be tested on.
  • Do read the Editors and Administrators manual. As a developer you are supposed to know how to use the product from an end users perspective.
  • EPiServer Developers knows to little about Deployment in general. Make sure that you undrestand how to configure EPiServer. Do you know how Mirroring works or Enterprise features like multi-homed sites and load balancing is configured?
  • Do read all the Tech Notes for the latest EPiServer CMS release. You need to have a basic understanding about all features in EPiServer.
  • Do read through the pages in the Developers Guide part of EPiServer SDK, too. Personally I do not understand why they put some pages in the SDK and some as Tech Notes. It is high and low in both places and you must at least browse through it all…
  • Do not try to read through the whole Framework Reference. You could look on a few key classes like: PageBase, UserControlBase, TemplatePage, IPageSource, PageData, PageReference, DataFactory, PropertyData and PropertyDataControl. And also make sure you know your EPiServer Web Controls.

Many questions is on a very detailed level and I must say that I have heard a lot of complaints that the test is too hard. You have to make qualified guesses. I had to do a lot of qualified guessing myself , and I’m an EPiServer teacher and have turned EPiServer inside out with Roeders Reflector!

Remeber, you do not have to get 100% to pass and if you follow the tips above I’m sure you too will be a Certified EPiServer Developer…

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  1. Mikael Lundin’s avatar

    Mikael Lundin on November 30, 2008 at 13:02

    Thanks!

    We still have a bunch of developers that are going to take the test, so I wanted to give them some idea of what to study.

    I think the test was good in a way that you will have a really hard time to pass if you don’t have enough experience with EPiServer. It’s a measurement that you actually know the framework and it gives the certificate a higher creadability.

    I wonder though how many developers that actually use the workflow foundation functionality in EPiServer and if it really should be in the test. But I guess that is why you need 60% to pass and not 75%. :)

    Reply

  2. Björn Karlsson’s avatar

    Björn Karlsson on December 18, 2008 at 10:14

    Thanks!

    I took the three day course in “EPiServer” with you in November 2008, and tried to become a ‘EPiServer Ceritified Developer’ the last day of the course. I did not pass.

    But yesterday I took the test again and passed =), many thanks for writing about important things to study.. that helped me alot.

    Reply

  4. Fredrik’s avatar

    Fredrik on January 15, 2009 at 11:35

    Hi!

    I just took the CMS5 test, failed with 1% margin – I’ll admit I’ve only been developing in EPiServer for about six months, sure some of the questions are valid knowledge you should know from the top of your head.

    … but, a lot of the questions are horribly designed such as the page.ACL.QueryAccess()-question and it’s siblings where you have four methodcalls/class names/property names which all look very much alike and have to pick the correct one and in all honesty the reason I use VisualStudio to develop is so I dont have to remember stupid things like that and can focus on the implementation details of my application instead of having to remember parameter orders and class/method names, sigh.

    And the fact that there are no clear instructions on what to study for the test is even worse, coupled with the fact that detials are sprinkled among episerverworld-blogs, the sdk and tech notes… well, yeah.

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  5. Jon Marks’s avatar

    Jon Marks on July 13, 2009 at 09:10

    I passed it first time, but felt quite lucky to do so. A lot of very detailed questions about things you’d look up in your API reference and never remember. The thing that saved me is being able to flip between unanswered questions and looking at pieces of code.

    My advice: Do not answer any of the questions you know the answer to if they contain code samples. You’ll be overjoyed to come back to them later! Come back to them at the end and answer them once you’ve sure you won’t get any use from them.

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  6. Ben Morris’s avatar

    Ben Morris on August 21, 2009 at 21:15

    It’s a pretty rough exam all told that includes some very obscure parts of the SDK.

    However, it’s not that bad if you know your .NET framework and you’ve done a couple of EPiServer projects. A lot of questions can be guessed correctly just by asking yourself how you would implement something if you were following standard .NET design patterns.

    Make sure you go through all the questions before you answer any of them – as Jon Marks has pointed out, some questions later on in the test can give you clues to earlier questions…

    Reply

    1. Fredrik Haglund’s avatar

      Fredrik Haglund on November 17, 2010 at 17:34

      I have updated the links…

      Reply