A little while back on his PHP Kitchen blog Demian Turner asked the question, "Is vendor sponsored software certification the way to go?". An easy example? The Zend Certified Engineer tests.

Currently Zend certification is one of the only options available to PHP devs who want to get accredited, however. But judging by general feedback from the community it would appear that, despite the current certification choices, quality discrepancies between PHP devs on the market can still be pretty...impressive.

He points to another post from Darren Hague (on Derren's SAP blog) that has three elements that any good certification needs to really be considered successful:

• Quality - it must be professional and independent
• Portability - it must be independent of the company you work for at the time
• Customer Demand - without demand for certified people in that area, there's no reason to have the certification

Be sure and check out some of the comments to Demian's post form some other opinions.