Oracle Java Certification: do you need it?
OCP Java SE certification is infamous for its difficulty and a wide variety of topics. It requires a lot of time and determination to pass the exam, but the real question is: Is it worth investing your money and effort to earn the title of “Oracle Certified Professional Java SE Developer”?
I’ve spent about 400$ and six everyday-study months to get it and I want to help you decide whether this exam is worth your time and effort.
A quick note, I passed Java SE 17 exam but given that all currently available OCP exams have similar structure and require about the same amount of study, my advice will probably be applicable to other versions as well.
Let’s start with what you’ll basically need to pass an exam and then see what benefits you get from it.
Price
The first and most obvious is that you need to buy an attempt to take an exam. The attempt is single-use meaning that you have only one try and if you fail — you’ll need to buy another one attempt.
The price ranges from 240$ to 300$ depending on your location. It isn’t cheap, that’s why I recommend you to talk to your management and let them sponsor this certification for you.
That was exactly my case, it was set as a part of my Personal Development Plan and my company agreed to pay for it.
Actually, it’s a common case, many companies encourage their engineers to pass industry recognised certifications, it’s especially true for outsourcing companies whose reputation benefits from having certified developers on board or companies relying heavily on Java ecosystem.
You’ll also need solid preparation resources to pass the exam from the first attempt. I recommend by Jeanne Boyarsky and Scott Selikoff (≈75$) and (≈10$).
Difficulty and preparation
The exam is fairly difficult even if you already have a couple of years of professional experience.
It covers a broad range of topics and some of them are not very common nowadays: Serialization, JDBC (PreparedStatement, CallableStatement, ResultSet etc.), Java Platform Module System.
You’ll need to grasp not just the basics of these technologies, but also be prepared to solve tricky questions — especially if you haven’t worked with them in real-world scenarios.
Fortunately, most questions focus on more familiar topics like Java Object-Oriented Approach, Stream API, Arrays and Collections. Making sure you know the basics is important but as always be ready for tricky questions.
Also, each exam covers features added since the previous LTS version, for example OCP Java 17 covers Record Classes (introduced in Java 14) and Sealed Classes and Interfaces (Java 15). Thus it may require an additional effort to learn new language features.
Last but not least: the exam includes questions about Concurrency and I/O. Both topics are quite challenging so I highly recommend spending extra time brushing up on them.
Is it worth it?
The exam will be beneficial if you want to:
- have an official confirmation of your knowledge and stand out during a recruitment process;
- deeper explore core language APIs, cover gaps and become familiar with newest language features;
- be able to read code faster and become a better code-reviewer;
- get a confidence boost after achieving a challenging goal.
However, the exam may not be for you if you:
- have just started learning Java;
- are not ready to invest 3–9 months in continuous learning;
- already possess solid confirmation of your skills;
- don’t wish to spend some time learning topics in which you’re not particularly interested in.
The road to OCP Certification is a challenging but rewarding journey and I wish you success if you decide to take it!
