We are extremely pleased to announce that the Symfony and Twig certification exams are available online! It means that you can now take the exam from home or from your office! You need your computer, a web cam and a stable Internet connection!
Fabien Potencier introduced the Symfony certification program during his keynote at SymfonyLive Paris 2012 and the first certification session was organized during the conference. At that time, the certification was only organized during official Symfony events. The exam was hold in the conference venue and proctored by the SymfonyLive team. Then different exam sessions were organized during the year at SensioLabs’ offices. The first certification was dedicated to the 2.3 version of the framework.
In October 2013, the Symfony certification was launched worldwide and available in 4,000 physical exam centers to enable much more people to take it. At the same time we introduced the « Advanced level » as an intermediary step before the « Expert level ». Since then, the certification exam was only available in one of the 4,000 worldwide exam centers available.
The Symfony 3 certification was launched in December 2015 and the Twig certification was introduced in June 2016. Lately this year, on March 30th, we introduced the Symfony 4 certification.
We are now moving forward with the certification! We wanted to enable everyone to take any exam no matter where you are in the world 1: as long as you have a computer, a web cam and a stable Internet connection, you can take it. As of today, the certification exam is only available online for any Symfony versions and Twig. You don’t have to go to any exam center, schedule an appointment and physically go there to take the exam. Now it’s faster and easier to take the exam, you can take it from your own home or office.
How do the certification exams work? Any Symfony certification lasts 90 minutes and includes 75 questions divided into 15 topics. Check here the exam topics of all the Symfony certification exams. The Twig certification lasts 60 minutes and includes 45 questions divided into 8 topics. Find here all the exam topics of the Twig certification exam.
Both certifications, the Symfony one and the Twig one, do not include any written answers or lines of code to write. You have 3 types of questions : True / False, Single answer or Multiple choice. Your online certification exam will be proctored during the entire test, the proctor will ask you to test your camera and show the room where you take the exam before starting the test. Don't forget to test and check your camera and network connection before starting!
To book your online certification exam, follow these steps:
1- Buy your certification voucher for Symfony 3 or 4 version or for Twig
2- Create your candidate account or log in to your existing account
3- Activate your voucher to schedule an exam appointment
4- Take the exam online in your own home or office and get your result immediately!
When you buy your certification voucher and activate your voucher, you have to wait for 24 hours before scheduling your exam. You can buy your certification voucher today and become a Symfony or a Twig certified developer tomorrow!
We are proud to count about 400 certified Symfony and Twig developers in our community and we’d like to congratulate again all the certified Symfony and Twig developers! You want to become a Symfony or a Twig certified developer? Book your certification voucher at the unique price of 250 € for Symfony and 149€ for Twig.
If you have any questions regarding the Symfony and Twig certification exams, please read our FAQ section where you’ll find more detailed information. Good luck!
1Exceptions of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria due to US Foreign policies.
That's a great news! Now: "We wanted to enable everyone to take any exam no matter where you are in the world" I CAN NOT choose "CUBA" as "Country of examination" WHY??? CUBA is not part of the world? This makes me feel very bad and discriminated!
Yonel, I'm really sorry about this ... and it's understandable that you are upset. Sadly this is a problem related to politics which we cannot solve.
The new provider for the online certification is a company from USA, and the USA government doesn't allow its companies to do business in certain countries. In addition to Cuba, the online certification is not available in Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.
Also, because the online certification requires continuous monitoring of the person taking the exam, is restricted to people of 18 years of older, also because of some USA legal requirements.
That's amazing, saves lots of time especially when center is not near. Because it is online, am I allowed to use help if I can't remember some method name (due to autocomplete)?
I already failed once and I know some of the questions I failed. For example; I didn't know correct syntax for forwarding request because PHPStorm does it for me (and I only used it once).
There are few more I did wrong like mistaking DOMCrawler for CssSelector component.
Thanks.
@Zeljko I'm afraid it's not allowed to look for some method name. Read the "notes" in this page to learn more about the exam conditions: https://certification.symfony.com/purchase.html
Great news :) you mentioned "Buy your certification voucher for Symfony 3 or 4 version or for Twig" this is not available for symfony 2.3 voucher ?
@Zakaria that's correct. We don't want to promote 2.x voucher any longer. Besides, at the end of November 2018, the last active version of Symfony 2.x (which is 2.8) will stop receiving bug fixes (see https://symfony.com/roadmap/2.8).
No, I don't believe so, like any other exam you are expected to know these things.
The same goes for doctors, and any other profession, you are expected to know these things when you are certified. Sure, you might need to look something up when you don't use it daily, that's normal, but you know the majority of things.
Relying on tools like autocomplete, syntax highlighting or xdebug is great to help you with your daily work, but being a professional means you can proof you know these things other rather then relying on only your tools, Assembly coders that worked with a PDP didn't have debugging or syntax highlighting (there wasn't even screen, only a typewriter that printed what you typed 🤪 ).
I got started with PHP using notepad and no internet connection! You know how hard it is to use notepad? More then often it failed, but I still managed to make it work (after hours of cussing...). If PHPStorm (or Zend Studio at the time) fails to work or is not available I can still use Atom or notepad++, there is no autocomplete, no error highlighting or even code generator. But still I can make it work resorting to only my knowledge (and tests).
That is what being a professional is about, knowledge is power! PHPStorm is a tool. Tools make our lives easier but they can fail, and when that happens you need knowledge to make it working again.
If an exam allowed these kinds of things to make it easier, the exam would loose its added value, anyone could pass it by Googling the answer or using suggestions, the certification becomes nothing more then a tittle for anyone who can pay for it.
What if your brain surgeon winged himself through college (hello Dr. Nick), "what that's that thing in your skull?" Can you trust him with your life?
I have seen people (in Holland) wing themselves through a drivers exam by cheating the rules! And guess what, they drive terrible and might even kill (or have killed) someone because they don't know the freaking rules!! They cared more about getting their license rather then assuring themselves with the rules, which exist for a reason, to ensure safety of themselves and those involved in traffic.
This is what happens when exams (in general) become to easy or when cheating is not prevented, it looses its value and security, we compromise until we no longer care. And people become more obsessed with getting certified (or getting their license) rather then remembering why these rules and requirements were set-up in the first place. In this case to assure knowledge and skills.
If you didn't make it first time, you try again, yes it's painful to fail, but not the end of world. If you believe in yourself you can make it, maybe not the next time, maybe not then, but when you do make it, it will be ever more rewording because you achieved something that is hard, you worked for it, and deserve that honoring title, and that makes you special, it makes you a professional! You don't compromise but you show you care, and do it right.
Some closing tips.
If you really want to learn how do things properly you might want to stop using PHPStorm for a while or stop using the auto suggest, you learn best by doing things yourself rather then letting someone (or something) do it for you. Tools help us, they don't replace us.
Hopefully I wasn't to harsh, I am trying show why caring about these things matters to be a professional. I am not suggesting that you cheat by using auto suggest. I will try to explain my thoughts a little better below.
Uncle Bob Martin had a good talk on this, if we stop caring about quality as programmers, and compromise (endlessly) just to make it work, we loose control of our code, we start to compromise until we no longer care.
And that's dangerous, we will loose respect and value for our craft, our industry will become regulated by law to ensure all software we produce is of a good quality and secure! Being certified will become mandatory rather then an added value.
We are responsible for what we produce, if we allow ourselves to knowingly allow code of a lesser quality to be released, we are responsible for the outcome of that broken code. People have died because of faulty code! I am in the process of building a hosting system (open-source) and carry with this a major responsibility, think what will happen if this system will ever get hacked?! I will be responsible for that (not lawfully btw), but ethically, if I can't proof I took proper steps to prevent this from happening. Compromise it not an option here.
To me the first step in being a professional is to show you care to do things right, not because they are easy but because they matter. Or as and old saying goes: Soft healers make for stinky wounds. Sometimes you need to be harsh or touch, to do whats right.
Thanks Sebastian. Yes, PHPStorm is a tool, I agree, but Symfony is a beast! I mean... all the crazy things you can do is far beyond my imagination and to be honest, quite difficult to remember. Or at least for me.
For example; I built tons of compiler passes, form extensions, custom route annotations (even undocumented usage of Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\ConfigurationInterface) but I find it hard to remember their namespaces. Sometimes even class names; guess I am getting old.
Anyway, this is not a forum. Thanks Javier for answering; I will try again. I really want that badge :)
Dear Javier Eguiluz, It's interesting, people from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria can contribute to Symfony but cannot get certified in Symfony. Also, if you wanted to enable everyone to take an exam no matter where they are in the world, You should choose a provider that has no limitation from the USA government. If you can't, please remove that bolded sentence from your blog.
That is awesome! <3
@Amir Unfortunately, it's not a question of provider, trade bans apply to the whole world. Basically, the US makes it illegal both :
This means every company in the world has to choose between working with US companies or with Cuban/Iran/... companies.
I don't think it's fair to blame Symfony on this, it concerns everyone and it's something Symfony can't do anything about. Plus, there is a list of the exceptions at the end of the blog post, so the limitation is transparent.
nice step to have the possibility to make the exam online. sad thing is that the offline possibility is gone. i would have prefered to take the exam offline.