I’ve had the privilege of coming onboard different kinds of teams - small, medium, large. The level of preparation for new joiners was equally different. Some years ago, a developer was joining our team and on his first day, he sat at an empty desk looking rather lonely. A computer was hurriedly commandered from somewhere and somehow, before the end of the day he had access to the network and some tools.

I’d always weighed the pros and cons of taking the Zend PHP Certification exam since its early days. For me, the overriding argument against, was that you can teach art but you can’t teach how to paint The Scream or Mona Lisa. So I focussed on the practical art of programming.

Around the middle of last year, as my fixed-term cotract was drawing to a close I felt like changing jobs. I’ve always had the good fortune of being able to find a new placement within a short time. This time around I discovered a number of changes in the job market one of which has to do with being a PHP and Drupal developer.