There are plenty of dirty words thrown around the Drupal community in my 7 years here, but perhaps none more loaded than Certification. A fiercely independent community, we have long been resistant to the idea of anyone claiming to speak for the Drop.

But Drupal has grown up. For better of worse, Drupal is being implemented by gigantic companies who not only need to quickly hire hundreds of developers, but also need to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Gone are the days when customers are going to care about drupal.org profiles or developer blogs.

Warning: This talk is an unabashed argument for certification programs, but it is also a discussion of how we as a community will react and adapt to them.

We will examine existing certifications in both proprietary (Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, Sitecore) vendors and also our open source sisters (Red Hat, Zend, Ubuntu, Liferay, Enterprise DB). There will be details: formats, costs, demand and results.

Finally, I will propose my vision of what it could look like and a peek into what Acquia's thinking is on the space.