Microsoft certification and alternative paths

Question

I work in an environment where the microsoft certifications are quite highly regarded - and I'm studying for some of them. I do a lot of non-microsoft javascript/ajax work and this is got me thinking about what are the alternative options if you are not a microsoft person. There is no recognised javascript certification or (I'm guessing) php certification. I would imagine this makes employer's jobs difficult. I see recently google have announced a certification program for google maps, so they obviously see the benefit of having a quantifiable idea of what someone can do. So, really my question is what are the alternative, and meaningful, avenues to gain recognised non-microsoft qualifications?

Answer 1

Well for PHP try zend other than that it tends to be vendor specific, e.g. Sun, Oracle, etc. CompTIA offer several non vendor specific certifications but they are all Harware or Linux based rather than Developer based.

Answer 2

I can only speak of the interface development part of the world (the one I work in): As far as I know there's no single recognized qualification there. The closest I know is the course that Opera is working on, called the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, but it's not quite done.

Answer 3

Nearly all certifications are administered by a specific company. Sun offers a range of Java (though not Javascript) certifications.

Other organizations, however, like the National Computer Science Academy, offer certifications in Javascript. From what I hear, these are generally less rigorous and well-known.