>>just wanting to know.
>>is it worth being VFP certified?
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>I have learned from being certified in vfp3 and vb3,4,5, but no one has ever asked me whether I was certified. Also if I ever mentioned certification to anyone it has never seemed to matter to even one person that I was, so I'm sort of hot and cold on this issue.
>
It's certainly a valid POV; I never took the older VFP cert exams, and didn't have it as a stated requirement on any projects I interviewed for as a consultant, so I didn't see my lack of certification as an impediment. With no MCSD option focused on VFP, I didn't consider it important.
I'm not offering an unbiased perspective now, as one of the authors for the DeskTop exam. I take the importance of VFP certification much more seriously, and understanding how the tests work and what goes into them makes them seem much more valid. I can assure you that the beta exams were tough, both from the standpoint of creating the exam, and from the standpoint of having a skill set adequate to be able to get through the test and cover the range of topics tested by the exam. I took the beta exams with the rather arrogant assumption that if I didn't know this stuff already, no one did. There were a lot of questions, especially on the distributed exam, which left me a bit humbled - a number of scenarios that I had to admit were valid test objectives, where I was left with a guess at the end.
And I test well.
Now that I'm more involved on the other side of the fence, while I may not require a candidate to have passed the VFP certification exams when specing out a candidate requirements list, seeing it on a resume will command a healthy respect. It's a good filter for basic VFP skills, when picking through a list of resumes to see who's going to come in and interview, and who gets a polite "Thanks for submitting your resume..." letter. And I'll encourage clients who're looking for other than entry level candidates to give this some credence, too.
And FWIW, I haven't seen my own results - I'm still not sure I passed both betas!
