What does it mean to be OCP Java SE 11 Developer Certified?

Update (11/05/2020): Read The 1Z0-819 Exam page to learn how you can easily our Java 11 Study Guides to prepare for Oracle’s 1Z0-819 Exam, as well as the 1Z0-817 Upgrade Exam.

I wrote a similar blog post for the Java 8 OCP cert. There are different requirements for what you need to know in terms of which exam path you took in order to take the cert. This post summarizes the differences.

Also see Should I take 1Z0-816 or 1Z0-817

The three main paths

Oracle has several paths for one to become OCP Java 11 certified. The major ones are:

There are a few others paths like you took the OCP 8 and not the OCA 8. I’m not covering those paths as they are less common. (Officially OCA 8 was a pre-req for OCP 8. You can take the exams in either order, but most people went in the prescribed order.) If you took an “unusual” path, see Oracle’s list of options.

What one would expect

It seems reasonable to assume some things here.

  1. People taking the OCP 11 directly should be tested on the topics that entail being Java 11 certified.
  2. People taking the upgrade from OCP 6, 7 or 8 should be tested on just the topics that were added since they took the exam.
  3. People taking the exam after the OCA 7 or 8 are tested on OCP level knowlege.

These assumptions turn out to not match what Oracle actually did. The rest of this blog post describes the surprises.

Major topics people who are OCP 6 certified can avoid being that those starting a with Java 11 cert must know

  1. Annotations
  2. Concurrency (beyond threads)
  3. JDBC
  4. Secure Coding

My thoughts: This is a lot of topics to be able to skip! There’s probably a bunch of smaller things, but these four are plenty big in their own right!

Major topics people who are OCP 7 certified can avoid that those starting with a Java 11 cert must know

  1. Annotations
  2. Secure coding

My thoughts: Less than OCP 6.

Major topics people who are OCA 7/8 certified can avoid that those starting with a Java 11 cert must know

  1. Some topics that used to be on the OCP 8

Summary

I like that Oracle isn’t covering topics on the upgrade exam that have been removed form the OCP 11. But there’s a lot of topics you can skate by without knowing if you take the upgrade exam with an older certification.

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