I've gone on at length about certification before, just wanted to say to those who haven't sat a Macromedia certification exam that they are not necessarily pushovers, they do test quite a few things you wouldn't pick up from a book, and if I was employing someone myself I'd favour a certified candidate over a non-certified one, all other things being almost equal.
Well, the cert exam seems to test some esoteric stuff that you'd almost never need to know and in real life, you'd certainly go look it up in the reference docs (or let DW / HS provide code hints). In real life you don't need to know all of the fussy little attributes for tags - in a cert exam you do. That's why I don't think most certs measure real world ability. I sat a sample test without doing any cramming and I got 'advanced' - but I actually did look a couple of things up, as if I were solving the problem in the *real* world. The two or three things I looked up wouldn't have changed my score much if I'd just guessed them, I suppose...
When you're starting out, certs are good - they show you're trying to improve and measure your skills. Once you've got some good experience under your belt, they become less valuable in my opinion. Having said that, if I had two candidates who were absolutely equal in all other respects, including experience, personality, communication skills (vitally important, in my book!) etc - I'd probably pick the certified candidate.
I think other employers are interested in certified developers too - earlier this year a certified Flash developer from overseas came to work in Sydney
It may well be that Australia values certification more than America (or England?). I think there's some cultural aspects to our opinions about examinations in general...
Sean A Corfield -- http://www.corfield.org/blog/
"If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive." -- Margaret Atwood
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MXDU2004 + Macromedia DevCon AsiaPac + Sydney, Australia http://www.mxdu.com/ + 24-25 February, 2004
