Waldo Smeets .com

Today I did two Macromedia Certification Exams and I passed both of them! From now on you may call me Certified Macromedia Flash MX Designer as well as Certified Macromedia Flash MX Developer. The exams were not easy, but I passed them with respectively 85% and 88% correct ansers which of course makes me a happy man.

I really encourage everyone to get certified. If you have been working with Flash for a while and study a bit for the exams, you should be able to pass them. However, don’t underestimate it, the exams really cover what it’s all about and that does not make them easy.

Even though ‘designer’ sounds like you need to know how to make drawings, it’s absolutely not like that! The Designer exam covers the core strengths of Flash MX; if you pass this exam you have shown that you understand decent architecture of Flash movies, know about file size and streaming issues, understand how to use the authoring tool, can use actionscript and much more.

If I was in a position to hire new employees for a company, I would defenitely look for certified designers and developers. I have seen it happen too often that Flashers have been judged on how good their sites look, instead of looking whether it has been architectured properly. If I was in that position, I would first ask the candidate whether he/she is certified and if so, if they can show me some cool sites, they’ll be in 😉

ps: This means that I would never hire myself; I do have a certification but I am very bad in ‘making sites look good’, lol.