Magento Certified Solution Specialist

For a long time, I was unsure if it is worth the money to do a certification. But since I won a voucher for a certification long time ago, I of course decided to do it at some time. The voucher expired at the end of last year, so I quickly had to take the certification between Christmas and New Year. Since I had nearly no time to learn, I decided to take the easiest one first 🙂 To make a long story short, I am now a Magento Cerftified Solution Specialist.

I was not sure if I would pass the exam, because many customers just do not use features provided by Magento and because I have no experiences with Magento Enterprise. But finally I succeeded rather easily with a good result. As a very short preparation, I did two things. First, I clicked through the whole Magento administration panel and had another look at each area. Second, I read through the Magento Certified Solution Specialist (MCSS) Study Guide from Demac Media twice. This guide just answers the questions provided by the official Magento Certified Solution Specialist Study Guide in note form. It helped me especially to get a feeling which features Magento Enterprise provides. Thanks to the team of Demac Media for it.

For the exam itself, there was plenty of time (90 minutes) – I actually finished after 45 minutes although I revised a lot of questions after the first run. The tool used for the exam is quite handy: You can skip questions completely, you can answer them and in any case you can mark the question for later revision. At any point in time, you can revise the unanswered and marked questions. Hence, I answered all questions in the first run and marked a lot of them where I was not 100% sure. In the end, I revised all marked questions and finished quite early. What I did not know in advance and what is quite nice is that you are always told the number of correct answers. It is always clear if you have to mark one, two or three of the answers.

One thing one should note is that your English skills should be quite good in order to successfully take the exam. There are questions where rather unusual vocabulary is used and it is always important to understand the exact meaning of the texts. But if your English skills are good, you worked with the platform for more than a few months and you prepare for the exam shortly, you should be good to go. Good luck!