Now Certified

As mentioned previously, I took the Unity Certified Developer exam on Monday. Passed! Yay! I am now certified.

First, a few notes on the exam:

• If you can schedule time to take the test, take it!
• It's all multiple choice, matching, and hot-spot identification. No essays or written answers required.
• After the tests in a couple days, there's two in Bogata next month, and then tests in Amsterdam in June. It'll be a while before the exam makes its rounds again.

The tricky thing is that there isn't any courseware for the exam yet. There's a 3-page sheet of Exam Objectives, but that's mostly a thin gloss. The exam difficulty, to me, felt really spotty. Some sections had two questions that, if you read one page in the manual, would be trivial to answer. Other sections had a dozen questions or more and required some very specific knowledge, down to what keys to press to do certain things and how the compiler would feel about a handful of statements.

The next certifications that they add are going to be interesting; there's the Pro Programmer, Pro Artist, and Expert certifications that they've mentioned -- although there's no guarantee that those exams will be released, and no timeline for when they'll add them. Right now, I think, having the Certified Developer certification will be a rare thing on a resume and hence pretty useful. It's proof that you know your way around Unity. If all you did was watch an hour of video or played with the app for that long, there's no way you'd pass the test. Walking through the Exam Objectives was, to me, critical, as it made sure that I looked at features that I don't use day-to-day. Cloud Build? Navigation? I understand them loosely and I looked at videos years ago (well, not for cloud build; tho I did go to a meetup that discussed it) but I don't use these things. Passing the exam meant knowing these systems in some detail.

Which means the advanced tests are gonna be brutal.

As a programmer, I thought I'd have an easy time with the Programming section. Just for this basic test you'd have to be able to write a blog post on any of the sub-topics listed in the Objectives to get questions right. What's the Pro Programmer test gonna do?!

I'm still cleaning up my notes, and I'll be posting them here. I can't give away the text of any of the questions, but I'm going through the sections making sure that I covered what the test covered.

I'm Gonna Take the Unity Certification!

Scheduled later today! Unity just started offering the certification, and for right now there's just this one certification. They suggest that they'll later offer Professional Programmer, Professional Artist, and Expert certs, but for now it's just the one. I figure it'll serve as proof that one's at least gone through a set of tutorials and has played with all of the major bits of the engine. As someone that's been a Senior Engineer for over a decade it might seem odd that I'm taking the cert, but since I haven't yet gotten paid for any of my Unity work I'm actually in the target market. (The other major cohort would be college students or new college grads.)

I've been going over review material for the past week and I took extensive notes, with the idea of sharing them here. Once I take the test, I'll go back over each of the sections and review them to make sure they're actually relevant for the test. Look for those posts over the coming weeks.

One of the weird things to note is that you're required to bring a wifi-enabled laptop to the test. I guess a Chromebook would work, but I doubt that an iPad would. Dunno. I expect to see laptops, since that's what all the kids use these days. :P

The scheduled time is two hours, but evidently the test starts a half-hour after the start of that block, so the test itself I guess is limited to 90 minutes. Prior to that is "make sure your laptop works for this," I guess. I looked at the refund/retake policy and it seemed to be "you can only take the test once," so failing it doesn't allow you to freely retake it but I have no idea if technical difficulties established prior to the start of the test would suffice.

It does cost $250. For a starving post-college or non-college student that's a good chunk of change, but, again, I think the certification itself is great proof that you actually know your way around the engine.

So, who here is thinking of taking the certification? Or has already taken it? Raise your hands!