Spring Certified Professional
Not long ago I took the Spring Professional Develop Exam to become a certified Spring developer. I this short article I would like to share with you why I did it, how I did it and if I think it is worth the time and money.
Why did I do it?
Actually there are at least two reasons. One of the reasons is straightforward. I do work as a consultant in a company. I figured out it is easier for future customers to see my experience with Spring if I have some way to show it formally. The other reason is in my personal history. I did change my career a couple of times in my life. I have studied biochemistry, worked a bit in that field, had some other jobs, then worked in a high-throughput laboratory and finally became a software developer for a living in 2018. I never had formal training. I did take some courses on Udemy, Coursera and Pluralsight but I never got a piece of paper stating officially I know what I’m doing. So the second reasons was to calm my slightly active imposter syndrome.
How did I do it?
I’ve started working with SpringBoot in 2020, before that time I mostly did work in C#.Net. Aside from the languages I’m using I am mostly into concepts in software engineering. Stuff like, Dependency Injection, SOLID, Architecture, Functional programming, Object-oriented programming and so on. I’ve read my share on books about this topics and also participated in my share of discussions - still do acutally. Naturally, switching to a new language and a new framework made me learn the concepts of these right from the start, mostly by reading blog articles our looking at source code. To prepare for the exam I’ve registered at Spring Academy, set up a subscription and took the online courses offered there. As far as I know they are mandatory anyway. The nice thing is, a subscription comes with a voucher for the exam - not a bad deal. After watching all the courses I set out to search for example exams. I did find them at Certificate Questions. Then I started to go through all the question for this exam available there. Besides the training videos this was really helpful. The exam itself is multiple choice and the last time I did do a multiple choice test for an exam was over 15 years ago. I had to train that skill. Aside from training to parse multiple choice question, they do offer links and explanations for each question answers. This also helped. However, one word of advice: There are some questions which wrong or wrongly phrased answers - read up the examples and documentations and do not trust blindly. This may help as well. Further, some of the questions are about XML configuration which I never used and also did not learn in depth.
What did the training cover?
Mostly Spring and SpringBoot MVC, JPA, JDBC, ApplicationContext/DI container, Spring Security, Spring AOP, Configuarition, AutoConfiguration, ACID, Testing. SpringBoot Webflux/R2DBC was not included and not asked for.
Was it worth the time and money?
Yes, it was. The courses on Spring Academy helped to give a very broad overview over Spring and SpringBoot. Sadly, they did not offer the slides to download and some additional information they mention in the training videos is not available as well. But all in all the training was solid and sometime enlightening. There was stuff I did know by gut due to my daily work but now did learn why it is that way - this helped getting more confident and also getting faster in my daily work. Also, it was not only videos but hands-on with tutorials and coding ‘challenges’. As mentioned above, the subscription to Spring Academy did include a voucher for the exam. Therefore, I think it was worth the money. Anyway, it was not that expensive (roughly $300).
How was the exam?
Well, it is a Pearson VUE exam. As I’m not a friend of proctering software (and do not use Windows or MacOS) I did go to a local test center. You get 130 min for 60 questions. As mentioned, it is multiple choice test and the example exams helped a lot. You can mark questions, review marked questions and all the questions before finishing. My personal highlight was the comment function. You even can state comments about a question and its answers. I’m quite sure the still say your answer is either right or wrong, but you can try to make the questions better for the ones after you.
Conclusion
I do not think taking and passing the test alone makes this certificate valuable. However, if you take the time on the journey to look left and right and read up stuff it will surely help you in your daily work. The courses and preparation do a solid job and guide you to a lot to important topics. As an employer or customer I would ask more in depth question during application if I see this certificate as I want to make sure the person holding it did not only learn for the exam. This said: I still do not hold a piece of paper stating I might know what I’m doing. It is just a link and a badge ;)