Zend Announces 10,000th Zend Certified Engineer

Continued Growth in Demand for PHP Engineers Drives Increasing Need for Certification

Cupertino, Calif.—September 4, 2013—Zend, the PHP company, has announced that Geert Bergman, a Utrecht, Netherlands based technical advisor, is the 10,000th Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE). Bergman works with the full-service Internet agency Yard Internet, which offers consultancy, design, technical implementation, hosting and support to clients such as the Dutch Association of Banks. Bergman is one of seven Yard Internet employees to have passed the Zend PHP Developer Certification.

“At Yard Internet, our entire back-end is PHP,” said Bergman. “We use PHP to build in-house solutions in social networking, e-learning, e-commerce and more, including Scrivo, our open-source CMS that targets professional environments in which front- and back-end developers work together to create new designs and functionality. The Zend certification has improved the overall programming quality for our entire team, so that we can provide even better PHP service-side experience for our customers.”

PHP today powers more than 240 million websites, according to Netcraft [1]. Surveys have shown that PHP continues to be an increasingly popular choice for Web and mobile development, with 91 percent of PHP developers working on mobile apps and a growing number deploying apps to the cloud [2]. Last year’s Zend Developer Pulse survey also found that three-quarters of PHP developers find the language easy to learn and say they can get things done faster with PHP [3].

“More than any other language, PHP gives us the ability to develop apps rapidly and iterate frequently to help our clients achieve their end result,” said Bergman. “It’s always easy to give clients direct, ongoing feedback about the things we change.”

Zend Certification: The Gold Standard of PHP Certifications

Zend provides PHP developers and software development organizations with two certification tracks – Zend Certified PHP Developer, which has become an industry-wide standard and a measure of distinction for PHP development skills, and the Zend Framework Certified Architect certification. Over the last year, Zend has seen over 1,500 new engineers pass the certification.

An industry-certified and audited certification, ZCE is built to American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standards, with exams held in proctored testing centers. Because Zend Certification exams are created with specific skills, knowledge and competencies that are matched to real-world job functions, Zend Certifications provide a measure of technical distinction that employers also use to evaluate prospective employees. Every year, thousands of PHP developers complete the certification in order to build their skill set and resumes, differentiate themselves from the competition, earn raises at work, network with other Zend certified developers, receive special discounts and more.

Bergman, for one, emphasizes that becoming a ZCE has helped Yard Internet better leverage the PHP language and bolster productivity. A total of seven Yard Internet engineers studied together for the exam, testing one another’s knowledge while studying. All seven of them passed the test, improving their own skills while boosting the capabilities of Yard Internet as a whole.

“At Yard Internet, we pride ourselves on the quality of the solutions that we build for our customers,” he said. “Even for advanced developers like us, some solutions take a lot of work to build and maintain. Only after the ZCE exam did we realize that we could have found some of these as existing best practices ready to go out of the box. The harder things in PHP, like references, are much better understood so they can now really be used to aid development. As a company, we’re excited to use the Zend Certification to indicate to the outside world that we have an A-grade team, and also to boost the average quality of our programming work.”

To learn more about becoming a Zend Certified PHP developer or a Zend Framework Certified Architect, visit:http://www.zend.com/services/certification/

To learn more about Zend and Yard Internet, go to: http://devzone.zend.com/3586/10000-zce/

Sources 

[1] Netcraft, “PHP just grows and grows”, February 2013. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/01/31/php-just-grows-grows.html

[2] Zend Developer Pulse Survey 2013. 
http://www.zend.com/en/company/news/press/425_survey-of-nearly-5-000-developers-provides-insights-into-state-of-mobile-app-development 

[3] Zend Developer Pulse Survey 2012.
http://www.zend.com/en/company/news/press/362_new-survey-of-3-000-developers-sheds-insights-on-development-trends-and-cloud-adoption 

About Zend Technologies 

Zend partners with businesses to rapidly deliver modern apps across mobile and cloud. Zend helped establish the PHP language, which today powers over 200 million applications and web sites. Zend’s flagship offering, Zend Server, is the leading Application Platform for developing, deploying and managing business-critical applications in PHP. Zend solutions are deployed at more than 40,000 companies, including NYSE Euronext, BNP Paribas, Bell Helicopter, France Telecom and other leading brands worldwide. Learn more at www.zend.com.