In reply to Rick Rottman.

Were you volunteering to help design the tests and conduct the certifications? Or at least set up the means to organize it on make.wordpress.org? It's an idea that has potential merit and you aren't the first person to wish there were some kind of standards by which to judge a person's basic WordPress literacy.

To the best of my knowledge, however, everything done by WordPress.org is handled by volunteers. In the spirit of open source, if there's something you want to see happen, you need to get it started.

An idea like certification would actually need much broader support throughout the WordPress community than a choice of what to focus development on for the next release. And it would require either a means to administer and grade the test online automatically (requiring programming to make it work) or a fairly large army of volunteers to undertake in-person testing. I imagine you could tie up years of surveys and committee meetings just figuring out what you wanted to test for, never mind designing the test itself.

And you have to decide how often people need to re-certify, because recommendations and best practices change rapidly in the web world.

Even if you get that far, it will only make a difference if enough people accept the validity of the test and care whether someone has passed it before hiring them.

And, finally, a test like that could determine whether the person had enough skill to install WordPress, set up a theme, and choose some plugins, or (at a more advanced level) whether they understand WordPress' action and filter hooks, plus PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but it will never tell you whether a person is honest, timely, able to understand (or even ask) what a client's real needs and goals are, or someone you can work with without both of you going crazy.