Wayne Beaton questioned the importance of certification for eclipse community. I’ve been wondering about this and seems like a great time to bring it up. Here is my humble TOP 5/DOWN 1 for having/not having them.

TOP 5

1. More visibility with the help of certification centres. Companies have budget for training and certification. Often these trainings are taken from classes where certification is available. There are not many eclipse trainings that have any wider acceptance.

2. Eclipse Foundation will get extra revenue to support development.

3. Certification path can be used for solid self-development roadmap for newcomers.

4. Software Companies get world-wide recognized training that will appeal to their customers.

5. Generates more business opportunities around eclipse. Training companies will provide eclipse-related training that is widely accepted. Promotion is supported by Eclipse Foundation. There will be more in-depth books to help with the certification. For example I find most useful java4 and java5 books to be the ones that are written for getting certified. They are read even by those who do not plan certification.

DOWN 1

1. Eclipse covers a lot of agile technologies that change too fast. Certification requires more procedures and arrangements so it would be much harder to keep up the pace as it is with java1.4->java5 cert exams. It’s pretty tough to push RCP, JDT, PDE, GEF, EMF, GMF, WST and Equinox into one certification path. It is also not clear if there should be a certification for non-developers (developing “with” instead of “for”; PPTP, WST, JDT etc).
Final notes
There are a lot of comments about certification being useless for extremly good developers. It’s true. Having a certificate is useless for any developer! You get the job interview wether you have a cert or not and after that it does NOT matter.

Certification is for business benefit. It helps companies to have a better understanding about their existing skillset and are able to promote their competency to their customers.

If eclipse foundation is not going to introduce certification then they should at least start maintaining a comprehensive list of companies that do the training.