Putting your search skills to the test: Lucid Certified Apache Solr/Lucene Developer Program

One of the singular qualities of search technology is its breadth: if it’s been written down (albeit digitally), you can…

One of the singular qualities of search technology is its breadth: if it’s been written down (albeit digitally), you can search it, and if you can search it, you can build a search app for it. That’s part of what makes Solr/Lucene so alluring for application development — you can build it to search just about anything, for anyone, in any way. Inspiring breadth, however, can be pretty daunting to master.

How, then, can you know how much you know about search with Solr and Lucene? In the world of Apache open source, there’s a clear meritocracy of peer review: contributors, committers, and active membership in the PMC. In theory, it’s a distinction anyone of sufficient talent and single-minded focus can achieve — just like anyone of sufficient talent and single-minded focus can make it to the NBA, or win the Nobel prize, or join the New York Philharmonic.

So you probably know your stuff if you’ve won the Nobel prize, made the NBA, or played the solo for Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto at Carnegie Hall, or you’re a Lucene/Solr contributor-or-committer. But what if you have not done any of those things, how do you know you know? Equally important, how do your peers or potential employers know how well you know your open source search stuff?

While there are more professional basketball players than Lucene/Solr committers, there are many, many more capable, talented, experienced Solr/Lucene application developers who are not going to ‘go pro’ in the Apache meritocracy. And the demand for Solr application development skills is exploding as interest and uptake of the leading open source application development technology spread like wildfire through organizations large and small. (Lucene Revolution, May 25-26 in San Francisco, will be packed with these people — sign up today if you haven’t already. And read on for another special opportunity at Lucene Revolution).

It’s exactly for the broad base of interested, committed search application developers that today we’re introducing the Lucid Certified Apache Solr/Lucene Developer Program; a certification exam designed to benchmark development skills and experience in building applications with Apache Solr.

Designed with Prometric and a team of subject matter experts comprised of Apache Lucene/Solr committers, developers, and trainers, the test is designed to rigorously assess a broad base of search skills and experience, and provide the closest reasonable approximation possible to a standard measure of search skills and experience. It’s delivered via Prometric.com, consists of multiple choice questions, and costs $250. The test reflects a carefully selected, broad range of topics intended to reflect the real-world challenges and landscape of search application development problems, which you can see here.

Eric Pugh, who wrote the book on Solr, says this:

“I expect that the Lucid Imagination certification will quickly become the gold standard benchmark for whether someone who claims Solr and Lucene expertise truly possesses it. Oftentimes, a buyer of services has to take the leap of faith from sales pitch to execution that the knowledge is truly there. This certification can show, without a doubt, that the holder truly has the knowledge required to deliver a successful Solr/Lucene implementation. In the open source world, there are very few marks of authenticity: committer status, published author, and now the Lucid Solr certification. Just as the CPA certification shows a high level of knowledge and ability in the accounting industry, the Lucid Imagination Solr certification demonstrates unquestionable knowledge and experience in successful Solr/Lucene search engine implementation.”

It’s important to be clear about what the certification is not:

It’s not easy: don’t expect to take your first Solr course one day and pass the exam the next.
It’s not a substitute for experience: if you’ve only built one Solr application, earlier this morning, using the wiki demo that runs locally in your browser, you won’t pass.
It’s not a substitute for training: taking a class from an expert may not be sufficient, but it will really help (and we offer the most professional-grade courses available; did I mention Lucene Revolution has classes available, too?)
It’s not a casual conceptual overview: expect to answer detailed questions on everything from Lucene fundamentals to Solr debug output.
It’s not a simple checklist of facts: you’ll have to demonstrate judgement calls in identifying correct answers to topic areas tied to searching, indexing, deployment, data source types, etc.

Testing as a pedagogical method — a mechanism for driving learning — is not the be-all-end-all of education (you probably didn’t think highly of classmates who asked the teacher, “Will this be on the test?”). But it turns out that tests can have a salutary impact on acquiring and retaining knowledge, according to a recent article in Science.

We expect that this test will help level the playing field for a broad range of application developers to acquire and prove their Solr/Lucene application development skills — and help employers who want to take full advantage of the best open-source search technology on the planet find the men and women who have the stuff to do it.

If you’re coming to Lucene Revolution, the exam will be offered there for free — a savings of $250 over the regular price. Details are here.