The Bubble Developer Certification is now available to everyone!

Announcements
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Hi everyone,

I’m Jeremy from the Education team (if you’ve ever watched our Academy videos, you may have heard my voice).

Today, I am so excited to announce that our Bubble Developer Certification exam, which was previously waitlist-only, is now open to everyone!

As a reminder, this is not an exam for beginners. The exam has 90 questions (randomized from an even larger pool) that are multiple-choice, multiple-answer, or fill-in-the-blank and cover a wide range of topics related to many different aspects of the Bubble platform…

Also, please note: This exam is proctored, which means that each attempt will be recorded and analyzed by an automated platform. This lets us protect the integrity of this exam for the benefit of the entire community by making sure no one passes the exam through cheating. You can read more about our open-book and anti-cheating proctoring policies here.

If you’re ready to take the exam, here’s how to get started:

  1. Make sure you’re signed in with the correct account on Bubble.io. This will be the email associated with your certificate should you pass. Please also double-check that both your first and last names are set in your account details. This name must be an individual’s; we’ll consider any certificate that lists a team or organization’s name instead of an individual’s as invalid.
  2. Sign in to the certification platform with your Bubble account: Navigate to our certification homepage and click the “Sign in” button at the top. This should automatically use the credentials associated with your Bubble account.
  3. Register for Bubble Developer Certification: It costs $49 USD to register for the exam. This registration lasts three months and gives you two attempts at taking the exam.
  4. Take the exam: Once you’re registered, you can start the exam any time within your three-month window. After a few brief introduction messages, you’ll hit “Start,” which will begin the timer. Be sure you’re feeling ready and free from interruption.
  5. If you pass the exam: You’ll be one of the first members of our community to earn the official Bubble Developer Certification! Your certificate will be valid for one full year from the date you pass.

If you don’t pass, don’t worry. Your registration comes with two attempts total, so you’ll have one more opportunity to retake the exam without having to register again. You can restart immediately, or you can wait to use your second attempt later — as long as it’s within three months of the date you first registered. If you don’t pass the second time, you’ll need to wait for your registration to expire and then pay the registration fee to re-register.

To read more about the certification process, please check out our updated blog post or the Certification page.

In addition to opening up exam access, I’m also thrilled to announce we have officially launched a Certification Advisory Committee (CAC). Every six months, we’ll be inviting a handful of certified members of our community to join. They’ll help us audit new questions and be able to submit their own. The first CAC cohort has already been selected — and has already made enormous contributions to the exam. You can meet them here. And if you’d like to apply for a future cohort, reach out to certadvisory@bubble.io.

If you have any questions, please comment below (I’ll be replying all day).

Thank you,
Jeremy

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Super cool! I had the opportunity to take this exam and found it challenging, but also super rewarding to accomplish.

Eventually, I think it’d be cool to do a “build a small example application that does x, y, and z.” This would really tie it all together, but also would require time to review each and every submission, so I understand why that’s not involved. It’s one thing to have the knowledge, and another to be able to apply it in actual development (thinking “street smarts” versus “book smarts”).

Overall, I am excited to see more Bubble Certified members around, and I could easily see the certification becoming a pre-requisite to many Bubble development jobs.

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Thanks @Jeremy! Definitely agree with @draked123, it’s pretty cool seeing the exam itself grow, expand and change since I took it back in July.

This certification is going to be game changing – finally a way for Bubble Developers to show off their skill level! All of this making it easier for employers to hire professional, certified Bubble Developers :blush:

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This looks pretty cool, but I find it a bit hilarious that you can’t use Google to find answers, but you can use the Bubble manual. I can’t count how many times I’ve had to resort to using Google to find a page in the Bubble manual because the manual’s search function doesn’t work very well.

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@Jeremy love the idea mate! Quick question, does “your certificate will be valid for one full year from the date you pass” imply we will need to pay $49/yr to renew our certifications?

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Yep! That’s correct, it’s $49 to retake the exam to be re-certified after passing it the first time

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Offering a critique of the certificate … I think it misses the main point of sitting the exam, which is to demonstrate the student’s knowledge to the community.

There is nowhere on the certificate that shows what it is certifying.

Presenting it to an employer would be meaningless unless they had also sat the exam.

Waving it around triumphantly in a pub (arguably a major reason to get one) would backfire when a mate reads the fine print with beer goggles.

This could be fixed by replacing the misleading “Course Completed” (there is no related course) with a summary of the skills that Bubble acknowledges in the student.

What happens to the certificate and its links if it is not re-certified?

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This is great feedback!

I assume that the link will remain active, but it’ll say the certification is expired. Maybe @Jeremy can clarify

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What is the point of the certification, @Jeremy ? The home page doesn’t really say much in the way of benefits, perks, etc. If the benefit is just to say “I’m a Bubble certified developer,” which clients likely wouldn’t care about if you didn’t bring it up, what tangible benefit is there in being certified? Do you get a higher listing in the agency directory? Do you get a special badge in the directory marking you as Bubble-certified? Is there a “Bubble-certified” filter in the directory? Is this more geared towards job-seekers trying to work for a Bubble agency? I’m just not sure what the motivation is in getting the certification, so any further info here would be great.

To be honest, I’m really not trying to be critical; I just want to understand what I’d be getting for passing the exam aside from a certificate.

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I don’t see how it’s game-changing, as I think only a small portion of the exam tests actual skills in terms of being a Bubble Developer.

Even if the exam gets better at testing Bubble dev skills, with a certificate system of pass/fail, the actual skill level of a developer won’t be able to be determined (as opposed to an actual result or percentile being displayed on the certificate).

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Fair, I suppose it’s more of something that can be used to reinforce your knowledge of Bubble and used on top of building apps, or answering questions on the forum, or creating content.

i personally don’t have many public apps – most of the things I’ve built are internal apps that i cant really share, so i feel like the certification is something i can use on top of answering questions on the forum to prove my Bubble skill-level/knowledge

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Wait… people care about people answering questions in the forum? How in the hell do I cash in on that?!? :wink:

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:joy: :joy: :joy: Mike, you’re the goat

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I think certification is a good idea, but I’m personally not interested because I find the pricetag really high. In fact, why can’t this be free?

There are other ways to verify people other than $…

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I see this more as a good MRR strategy than a certification program

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I hate to agree… I like the idea of standardized tests to get bubble developers up to speed with new features. However, 50 US dollars (for me that’s around 70$ CAD) just for the privilege to do that, is really, really expensive. I don’t pay that much for my phone and internet every month.

And it only lasts a year… I already pay bubble a lot of money for an agency plan. I should be granted the ability to take these exams and for any additional accounts that are part of my agency free of charge.

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The $50 to me seems reasonable. It just prevents (or rather disincentivises) people taking the test multiple times over a couple of days with different accounts until they pass. It’s basically a spam filter. I’d expect certified developers to start at $50 an hour so it’s not like it’s disproportionate to the amount they’d earn. Of course, I say this as someone that’s from the UK where $50 goes a lot less far compared to some of the developing countries that have high numbers of Bubble developers e.g Nigeria/India, but even though that might be a higher up front cost, they’ll still earn a good amount if it helps them get clients.

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I understand the filter argument, but I believe this “filter” for being verified user already more than exists. Let’s look at what an average freelancer / small agency is paying already.

Bubble bills:

  • Agency Plan (around 75$) / person / month (including ANY accounts with access to the agency inbox, NOT ONLY developers)
  • 30$ for agency website / month
  • Additional WU charges if they occur

Minimum per year: 1310$ for one person under an agency plan.

I believe anyone with any kind of paid plan deserves at the minimum a chance to do the certificate for free once a year. My expenses to bubble are becoming exorbitant. Throw me a bone, please!

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But that’s only true if a user is always subscribed to an agency plan. If they can’t find clients, they can just terminate their agency subscription until they find one. I’ve found the Bubble RFP area is the wild west and it’s hard to find serious clients there. I mean, one proposal probably gets bombarded with 50 requests so how can you blame them… but anyway, a user only really needs to be paying $75/month if they are actively developing for a client. The Bubble agencies tab is so useless that there’s little value being listed there at all if you’re not one of the so called ‘gold’ agencies.

Although, I completely agree with you that it expiring in a year is whack.

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Yeah, that’s probably the ‘right’ solution. But, on the other hand, anyone that’s got to the point of taking the certification has already spent at least $100 on some combinations of Bubble plans + plugins for a few months. I’m not saying that’s necessarily right or fair but that is just the reality right now so, it’s kind of just tough luck I guess.

It’s a real shame there’s no proper education plan that allows full access to the editor (i.e backend workflows) for free, especially because it costs Bubble basically nothing. I guess they’ve figured out disabling backend workflows on Starter plan is necessary to get people to upgrade.