EPIServer 7 Certification test–a personal note.

I will make no secret here: I’m no CMS expert. I might know one thing or two bout EPiServer CMS (of course, if I know nothing about it, I should have been fired for now ), but my knowledge is far from ones who’s working with it every day. From the day I joined EPiServer, I’ve spent most of my time working on EPiServer Commerce, coding, fixing bug, helping my teammates,…(And recently, posting on World forums), so my daily works involve most of entry/node/promotion/order/shipping, other than blocks or visitor group. Although these issues do not slow me down in daily work, but as an EPiServer developer, I always think my CMS knowledge is second rate and need to be improved.

I decided to take the challenge and with great help from Helen Hopkinson and others in training team, I was set up for a CMS 7 certification test this Friday. I spent most of my free time this week to prepare for the test, and just recently took the jump.

The greatest things about CMS certification test is letting me know how much I don’t know (about it).

Seriously!

I think the ones who wrote the questions did a great job of keeping the question balanced, in both terms of scope and difficulties. EPiServer CMS 7 is big and I wonder if there’s anyone know everything about it, but the test to make sure you have sufficient knowledge about almost aspects of CMS 7, from deployment, configuration, administration, editing and of course, development. You’ll need to be all in one, a C#/.NET developer, administrator and editor to be a CMS developer. The difficult range is quite good – you will have from easy to answer questions (even you don’t know the answer, it’s quite easy to guess) to the “hard” question you need a specific experience to answer.

I was lucky enough to pass the test with a modest score. Yay! Aside from my little celebration, I have some advices which might be helpful for future candidates:

- Developing an actual CMS 7.5 site is mandatory – but if you don’t have the chance, install Alloy and play with it, it will help enormously.

- Spend some times to read the entire EPiServer 7 SDK documentation. It’s not that big, but it will help you a lot. You might know a lot of thing, but what should it harm if it help to build a systematic knowledge about EPiServer 7?

- Spend some more times to read the administrative guide and user manual. You’re expected to be both administrator and editor! A quick read of those can help you to get some more precious points.

- Guess is OK. If you don’t know the answer, but you might know the choices which are definitely not answers, then take the guess. You won’t be punished for wrong answers!

- Don’t answer it yet. There’s chance that the answer of a question is hidden in another question. If you are not confident, skip the question and move forward. You’ll have chance to come back later and answer it.

An EPiServer Certified CMS Developer can mean many things. It can be an achievement, a requirement, or something else, depends on how you see it. For me, it serves as a starting point. Now I know one or two things more about CMS, but I also know many more things I’m yet to know. From the test, I can make further study, with the hope of becoming high proficiency in CMS and make my daily Commerce job more sufficient.

If you are an EPiServer CCD, then congrats! But if you’re not, I personally and highly recommend you to take the test. Regardless of your purpose, I think the test will help you, in one or another way.

Good luck!