A week ago last Friday I obtained my Flex 3 and Air certification. I believe it holds merits like showing a level of conscientiousness, professionalism and more than just some basic knowledge of Flex 3, Actionscript 3 and Adobe AIR. However I do think it could be significantly improved.

I think the questions could quite easily be:

• better designed,
• more relevant,
• of a wider variety,
• more challenging.

Personally I’d like to see more questions on areas like:

• generally accepted best principles and practises for flash platform application development,
• advanced features and uses of the mxmlc and compc compilers,
• features of some of the most common frameworks (Cairngorm, PureMVC, Mate etc),
• in depth knowledge of various design patterns (not just the most basic questions on the MVC meta-pattern),
• emerging issues – with new questions being introduced frequently; for example might be on offical new and forthcoming product releases (i.e. Flex 4 SDK, Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalayst) and their aims, features and differences, emerging issues (memory leakages, bug workarounds), emerging frameworks (Swiz), latest flash player adoption rates etc.

On the subject of relevance of questions, I don’t think there is much value to test largely on exact syntax of APIs. There are so many other types of questions that you could use to gauge a developer’s knowledge and skills on an specific area, and when our development environments feature things like code completion, syntax highlighting, Javadoc Views, live error parsing, copy and paste, templates and decent reference at hand (live docs) or even immediate F1 in context help on code – the case to test on knowledge of exact API and syntax becomes even less.

Adobe could certainly try and be a bit more innovative in creating the exam syllabus and format – to help, they could even outsource some eLearning and User Experience professionals with Flash Platform knowledge if they know any

Planning on taking the exam?

The exam preparation guide can be found here and I’d recommend testing your knowledge against the attest air app whose test exams are identical format as the real exam with not to dissimilar questions. This post Adobe Flex 3 Certification Study Material might also point you towards useful resources.

There are a large number of centres in London so for me it was pretty convenient to find one open on my preferred day even at as short a notice as 2 days. The only inconvenience was none were open that early or late. The cost was GBP 104.00 + vat (GBP 119.60).