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TIMOTHY JORDAN: This is I/O Live.
I'm Timothy Jordan.
And I'm at the community lounge.
This is where anybody can swing by and meet up with old friends
or make new ones.
I'm going to go find some certification alumni to talk
to them about the program.
Hey, Maria.
Hi, everyone.
How you doing?
SPEAKER 1: Doing good.
How are you?
SPEAKER 2: Awesome.
SPEAKER 3: Really Great.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Ha ha.
I'm sitting here with [? Henry, ?] [? Ashesh, ?]
and [? Somia. ?] And they're all alumni in the certification
program.
I'd like to ask you just a few things about the program
if that's OK.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah.
Sure.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Let's start with, how did you get involved?
What made you want to get certified?
SPEAKER 1: So actually before in Indonesia, they
have a scholarship.
So they give out the 500 scholarship for the people
to take with the [INAUDIBLE] and certifications.
And I register on that one.
And I got it.
And then after that, I tried certifications.
And yeah--
TIMOTHY JORDAN: So your path was from scholarships
to certification.
SPEAKER 1: Yes.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: [? Ashesh? ?]
SPEAKER 2: OK, so if you see the reason
I went for the certification.
In our professional life, we strive for few things.
One of them is to prove the worth to ourselves.
And second is to prove our worth to others.
So to proving worth to ourselves we go for a benchmark.
We try to achieve it.
So for me, that certification was a benchmark,
a milestone achieved.
And once I have achieved that there is only one way that
is to go for something higher.
Right?
So this is one reason to prove myself, the worth,
so that I can go for more higher things.
So certification was a commitment to me,
to myself, to go far in search of more knowledge.
And second thing is to prove worth to others.
So if you saw even you go for the job,
there are various phases.
There are interviews.
There are tests and everything.
But the first phase is always the qualification.
What degrees do you hold?
What certifications do you hold?
If you don't cross that door, there's no point.
I mean, you might be a very good programmer or something.
But if you don't have the initial key to that door--
so to have a certification, you are always
have a key to open a door.
So that was the other thing which I went certification for.
So in short, to gain confidence and to be job ready.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Thank you.
And [? Somia? ?]
SPEAKER 3: So I've been working on Android since 2010.
So it's been eight years now with Android as a developer.
I started with Android 1.6.
And I've done various application in Android
at different levels.
Play Store based applications, a lot
of enterprise applications in the last three,
four years, and things like that.
But I think what was the pusher, what
pushed me to do the certification was probably
that--
you know like [? Ashesh ?] said, there's a benchmark
or there's a standard with the certification.
And after working for so long in Android,
worked on various kinds of applications,
how do you differentiate yourself from the others.
That was a differentiation factor.
So I remember about two years back, there
was a conference in Google where I
asked about the certification.
And they said, yes, we are going to roll out the program soon.
And so I registered with the community groups.
And I got the email.
So I was more than happy to try it.
It actually is already--
what do you see here, 360 degree view on what your experience
is, a certification.
It judges you on a lot of skills, not just
one core skill.
You need to talk.
360 degrees of your skills are being mapped there.
So that was a great way to get that done actually.
So that's how I got into it.
And I'm happy that I achieved it also.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Thank you.
Can each tell me one thing that has been helpful
in your career because of certification?
SPEAKER 3: Sure.
So actually in my current organization,
we now have a team of about 20 mobile developers,
mobile team more or less.
And what I noticed was we had the support of the management
for conducting various certifications and things
like that.
But when we did the certification,
and I told my team that see, I did this.
And it was cool.
And it gave a validation to the team
also that how we're doing this.
And after that, very quickly, we have almost 10 team members now
who are certified already.
So that was a big boost, energizer to them too.
You know, from a team lead to the rest of the team
saying that, oh, you should do this.
And then that has worked out very positively for them.
SPEAKER 2: So we had to talk to them about exposing
our internal APIs.
And then our boss had to survey them.
So this was the one thing which motivated--
like when I was getting into Android, at that point
in time, I thought, OK, I will try to make the Android
app in-house for my company.
But the certification was not there.
So I was also a little hesitant to ask my boss
to give this job to me because the app
matters are such financially.
But once I got the certification,
and I told my boss, he was very happy about it.
And of course he was quite confident.
So now I have developed two Android apps for my company
in-house.
So we have more control over the apps,
especially since I'm working already.
I know the back-end and everything.
And our consumers also get something more robust
and something more user friendly.
So the certification helped me to gain
the confidence of my boss and to move my career in Android app
development.
SPEAKER 1: Before I took the certifications whenever
I applied to a company, I always chose the Android app developer
job.
And then they always give me the interview for an iOS developer
job.
Then I try the certifications.
And then after I get certified, it naturally
just knocked them to their senses
that, OK, I'm certified by Google.
So then they gave me more chances.
They gave me chances for the interview, for the test.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Yeah.
SPEAKER 1: Otherwise before, they just
gave me the test for iOS.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Thank you all so much for sharing your story
with me today.
If you'd like to learn more about certification,
head on over to g.co/dev/certification.
I'm Timothy Jordan and this is I/O Live.
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