15

Certification and Interview Tips

You have learned everything we had to teach you on the technical aspects of using MuleSoft’s products. After a long journey of understanding best practices and following how-to guides, you might now feel ready to start your career in the MuleSoft ecosystem. But where to start?

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Choosing your career path
• Getting MuleSoft certified
• Expanding your knowledge with the official training
• Contributing to the MuleSoft Community
• Passing your interview

When we say MuleSoft ecosystem, we mean that you don’t necessarily have to work at MuleSoft to have a MuleSoft career. You could work for a number of MuleSoft’s partners or customers. MuleSoft’s customers are those who pay for its products and benefit from generating Mule applications or architectures. While MuleSoft’s partners are companies that work to implement solutions for customers. Partners don’t necessarily benefit from the final product but from providing consultancy services. They work alongside MuleSoft to make sure the products are being utilized to their maximum and that customers are happy with the solutions. You could also work as an independent professional and lend your services on an hourly basis, although this option is not that popular in real life. Most professionals work with either partners, customers, or MuleSoft directly.

Let’s start by understanding the different roles you can have and choosing your preferred one.

Choosing your career path

When you want to start a career in the MuleSoft ecosystem, there are different career paths and certifications that you can follow to achieve a specific role. Each company defines its own roles to work with MuleSoft products, the biggest ones being developer and architect. However, how do these roles differ and what would you prefer to be? If you come from a Salesforce role, it might be easier to choose where to go from there – for example, if you’re a Salesforce architect, you might want to become a MuleSoft architect as well. Let’s take a look at the most popular career paths in the MuleSoft ecosystem and what they mean:

• Architect:
  • Works with clients to gather requirements and understand the required solution
  • Creates diagrams and documentation as an agreement of how the solution will work
  • Decides on security protocols and recommends technology stacks and best practices
  • Works with the developers to build the solution

Some companies leave the responsibility for the API specification (creation/maintenance) and the deployment to the architect instead of the developers or operations.

• Developer – covers almost everything we see in this book:
  • Transforms the business requirements into a solution
  • Is hands-on to create the code, ensure quality testing (unit tests), and troubleshoot any issues

Some companies leave the responsibility for the deployment to the developer instead of operations.

• Operations – widely known as DevOps (a combination of software development and IT operations):
  • Creates automated pipelines to reduce development time – also known as Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
  • Ensures code reaches the required environments, running automated tests and troubleshooting if the deployment doesn’t work
• Business user (this is not an official career path): Since MuleSoft’s acquisition by Salesforce, a new product combining the two technologies has emerged: Composer. This role creates integrations with this no-code tool using clicks instead of code. A great difference from the three previous roles is that you don’t necessarily need an IT background. You can be in a business position and still learn how to use Composer to create integrations.

There are some variants from the previous list of roles depending on the company and the size of the project. For example, if it’s a very small project (around 1 month of development), they might decide to only use an architect and a developer; but if it’s a huge project (more than 3 years of development), they might use more specific roles such as a designer who specializes in creating and maintaining the API specifications.

Choosing a specific career path doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have to stay on that path forever. A lot of people start as developers and become architects later on, or feel more interested in the operations side. There are plenty of training and resources out there to learn what you need in order to switch to a different path. If you just need a place to start and you have no previous experience, we recommend you start as a developer.

You might have a better idea of what career path you’re looking for after seeing this list. Now let’s talk about how to get more knowledge and prove it in your resume with a certification.

Getting MuleSoft certified

There are currently four available certifications you can get with MuleSoft to prove your knowledge (at the time this book was written). Some companies may have a requirement of holding at least one certification in order to apply for a position. While not a rule, it might be helpful for your resume to have more certifications (at least one).

There are two certifications for developers:

• MuleSoft Certified Developer – Level 1
• MuleSoft Certified Developer – Level 2

They each test your knowledge of the different products we have looked at in this book. The first one is the entry certification (or the most basic one). The second one was just released in June 2022, so not a lot of people hold this certification yet. It might be a great differentiator when looking for a new position.

The other two certifications are for architects:

• MuleSoft Certified Platform Architect – Level 1
• MuleSoft Certified Integration Architect – Level 1

While they are both for architects, they have different specializations. MuleSoft defines a Platform Architect as a person who lead[s] cross-project design decisions and focus[es] on visibility across systems and clouds to identify issues before they impact the business. While an Integration Architect is a person who make[s] project design decisions and [is] the bridge between architect managers and developers […] value[s] architectural repeatability and ensure[s] project quality (https://training.mulesoft.com/learning-path).

As you can see from the architect certifications, they are only Level 1. Level 2 certifications are still in the works but there’s no date to know when they’ll be published.

Here are some tips to get certified:

• Follow the requirements: If you go to training.mulesoft.com/certification, you can see the details of each path. Read them carefully and follow them as much as you can to really be prepared for the exam. All of the following details can be found on each certification’s page.
• Take the training: Each certification is linked to its own training. For example, to get the MuleSoft Certified Developer – Level 1 certification, it is recommended you take the Anypoint Platform Development: Fundamentals training.
• Finish the do-it-yourself exercises: The MuleSoft Certified Developer (MCD) certifications have their own DIY exercises so you can practice. Practice is one of the fundamental ways to pass the developer exams more easily.
• Take the practice exam: Once you feel ready, take the practice exam listed on each certification page. As ready as you feel, make sure you take this exam first. Aim to get 90% or more correct answers. If your score is lower than this, it may mean you’re not ready to take the real exam yet.
• Review the topics: Make sure you read all the topics that will be included in the exam. If there’s any topic you don’t feel comfortable taking, make sure you spend extra time on it. A lot of times, people don’t pass the exam because of that one topic they left out.
• Take the first attempt: If you purchase the training for each certification (or take the free self-paced one for MCD – Level 1), it will include two attempts to pass the exam. When you take the first attempt, don’t take it assuming you’re going to pass. Rather, take the first attempt as another practice. You will get a better feeling of what the exam is like and discover things you didn’t know. Take this opportunity to absorb the information you will need to learn for the second attempt.
• Manage your time: You will have 2 hours to finish and there are 60 questions. You have to manage your time effectively or you will run out of time. The exam’s platform lets you flag a question to go back to at the end if you still have time. It is better if you skip questions that are too hard and focus on the ones you can answer more easily than spending too much time on the harder questions.
• Take notes afterward: You cannot have any notebooks nearby while you are taking the exam. However, as soon as the exam is done, you can take notes of all you need to study for the second attempt. The quicker you write down this information, the fresher it will be in your mind, so try to do this immediately after you’re done with the first attempt.
• Find a quiet room: Someone will have access to your screen, webcam, and microphone while you take the exam to make sure you’re not cheating. You can’t look away from your screen or it might be misinterpreted as cheating. You can’t have your phone or smartwatch nearby and you can’t listen to music. In other words, there must be no distractions whatsoever. This environment might be stressful for some people, so make sure you make arrangements to be in a quiet room where you can’t get distracted as easily. Make sure no one will enter the room while you’re taking the exam, otherwise, the exam will be suspended immediately and you will fail your attempt.

Each certification exam is different, but they all consist of multiple-choice questions. The developer exams have more practical/technical questions, while the architect ones have more of a use case basis or are theoretical. You will notice the differences when you take the practice exams. Apart from that, the previous tips apply to all certification exams.

So, you chose your career path and your certifications, now let’s see how you can learn more things with some training.

Expanding your knowledge with the official training

You can find the complete list of courses at training.mulesoft.com/course-catalog. At the time this book was written, there were 16 courses available for you to take. Some of these are free and self-paced, and some are paid and instructor-led.

Let’s separate the training by career path to make things easier, starting with the developer training.

Developer training

Let’s take a look at the different types of developer training available:

• If you’re in a business role and want to see a quick overview of the tools but also get some hands-on experience, you can take the Getting Started with Anypoint Platform training. This will give you an overview of the main products in Anypoint Platform and guide you through some exercises so you can see them in action. This training is not aligned with any certification.
• If you want to get started with the MuleSoft products (both Anypoint Platform and Anypoint Studio), especially from a developer perspective, you should take the Anypoint Platform Development: Fundamentals training. This is more in-depth training that will get you started as a MuleSoft developer. It teaches you all the basics to get an idea of how to use the different tools to develop applications. This training is aligned with the MuleSoft Certified Developer – Level 1 certification.
• If you want to get more knowledge on RAML and learn some best practices to design your API specifications, you can take the Anypoint Platform Development: API Design with RAML training. Even if you’re new to designing API specifications, this will help you to get started and understand some more advanced topics to create RAML files. There used to be a certification for this training but there isn’t anymore.
• If you want to learn more about DataWeave, but still at a basic-intermediate level, you can take the Anypoint Platform Development: DataWeave training. This is especially useful if you have some specific DataWeave questions that you want to clear with an instructor. This training is not aligned with any certification, but it is useful to take it before attempting the MuleSoft Certified Developer – Level 1 certification.
• If you want to learn more about operations and how to get production-ready, you can take the Anypoint Platform Development: Production-Ready Development Practices and Anypoint Platform Development: Production-Ready Integrations training. This is helpful if it is your first time deploying your applications to production and you want to be familiar with the best practices. This training is not aligned with any certification.

Now let’s jump into the next path: architecture.

Architect training

As we previously saw when discussing the two different architect certifications, MuleSoft separates architects into Platform Architect or Integration Architect. There is training for each role:

• Anypoint Platform Architecture: Application Networks for Platform Architects
• Anypoint Platform Architecture: Integration Solutions for Integration Architects

Each of them will help you to get ready for the architect certifications.

Tip

Taking the architect training is not enough to get the certifications because there is so much knowledge required to pass the exams. However, they will give you the resources you need to study on your own even after the training is done. You should spend around 3-4 weeks studying the content in detail before attempting the exams.

There is additional training that is specialized in the healthcare industry and it helps you to implement a 360 use case. This is the Anypoint Platform Architecture: MuleSoft Accelerator for Healthcare training.

Now let’s look at the last path: operations.

Operations training

One of the great things about MuleSoft’s products is that you can choose between deployment options for the control and runtime planes, as we saw in Chapter 9, Deploying Your Application. With this training, you can learn more about how to achieve different deployment options and learn best practices for different scenarios.

If you want to learn more about Mule-hosted runtime and control planes, you can take the Anypoint Platform Operations: CloudHub training for the runtime plane part and Anypoint Platform Operations: API Management for the control plane part.

If you want to be more proficient in Runtime Fabric (customer-hosted runtime plane and Mule-hosted control plane), you can take one of the two available types of training, depending on which scenario you want to learn more about: Anypoint Platform Operations: Runtime Fabric on Virtual Machines and Anypoint Platform Operations: Runtime Fabric on Self-Managed Kubernetes.

There are other products to achieve customer-hosted deployments without having to necessarily have a Mule-hosted control plane. You can learn more about this in the Anypoint Platform Operations: Customer-Hosted Runtimes training.

Finally, if you want to learn more about creating custom sites or documentation pages for your APIs, you can try the Anypoint Platform Operations: API Community Manager training.

The list of available training is always growing to include more up-to-date information. If you want to work for a MuleSoft partner or customer, make sure they offer a budget for official MuleSoft training so you can keep up with the latest technologies and products. An alternative way of learning new things about MuleSoft is to participate in the MuleSoft Community, which we will look at next.

Contributing to the MuleSoft Community

The MuleSoft Community is supported by the community team at MuleSoft but is completely run by community members (not working at MuleSoft directly). There might be some MuleSoft employees attending or speaking at meetups from time to time, but the focus is on all the developers and architects using MuleSoft in their day-to-day work and sharing their knowledge and experience with the rest of the community.

There are several ongoing initiatives within the community that you can take advantage of. Let’s start with meetups.

Expanding your knowledge with MuleSoft meetups

This is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) initiatives of all. For years, professionals have been organizing, attending, and speaking at these meetups around the world. There are in-person and online meetup groups that you can join. In the beginning, all meetups were happening in person, until health restrictions were applied in 2020. At that point, all groups were switched to online meetups. Some groups have returned to in-person meetups now and some others are doing hybrid (in-person and online) events. You can join any meetup of your preference; it doesn’t have to be your local meetup group.

The first step you can take is to join your local meetup group or online meetup groups to keep posted about when there’s a new meetup. Then, attend more meetups to gain knowledge. Once you feel ready with a topic, you can apply to be a speaker at one of the meetup groups by contacting the organizers of the group. This could be beneficial for you because you might get free training or certification vouchers when you are a speaker. You can apply to speak at a meetup here: meetups.mulesoft.com/speak-at-a-mulesoft-meetup.

Find the complete list of meetup groups here: meetups.mulesoft.com/chapters. Some examples of meetup groups are the following:

• Online Group – English
• Online Group – Spanish
• Online Group – Portuguese
• Women Who Mule AMER
• Women Who Mule JAPAC
• Women Who Mule EMEA
• MuleSoft for Java Developers
• New York City, United States
• Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Paris, France
• Mumbai, India
• Sydney, Australia

There are more than 120 groups around the world. But that is not all: if your local meetup group is inactive or one has never existed, you can take the initiative and become a MuleSoft meetup group leader to organize the meetups for a specific chapter. You can apply to become a leader here: meetups.mulesoft.com/become-mulesoft-meetup-leader.

Becoming a meetup leader comes with very special perks such as getting free training/certification vouchers, access to special community events, free access to some MuleSoft conferences, and more. However, the best perks of the community are awarded to MuleSoft Ambassadors. To become a MuleSoft Ambassador, first, you have to become a MuleSoft Mentor. Let’s learn more about this.

Helping others as a MuleSoft Mentor

You can apply to become a MuleSoft Mentor once you feel ready to start contributing in a more formal role to the community. There are quarterly requirements that you’ll need to meet to continue being part of this program, but you also get great benefits in return, such as free training, special swag, and coaching with one of the MuleSoft Ambassadors.

This is the first step you can take to become a more recognized member of the community if you don’t want to become a meetup leader right away. Being a meetup leader and a MuleSoft Mentor are not correlated. You can be a leader and a mentor or you can apply to be a mentor without having to be a leader. The more you do for the community, the more points you’ll get in your favor to reach the MuleSoft Ambassador title.

You can find the complete list of requirements and benefits here: developer.mulesoft.com/community/mentors. Note that the full list of MuleSoft Mentors is not available yet. There are more than 100 mentors currently.

Once you become a mentor and have been a mentor for a while, depending on your level of contributions, you might look into becoming a MuleSoft Ambassador next. Let’s learn a bit more about that.

Becoming a MuleSoft Ambassador

MuleSoft Ambassadors are the top-tier experts in the community. They each specialize in a different area, which is very helpful for the rest of the people trying to learn MuleSoft. Some create high-quality videos on YouTube, some write articles, some help in the forums, and some speak at events and meetups. There’s not just one characteristic of being an ambassador that you can copy and apply to yourself since everyone’s so different. The thing they all have in common is their passion for helping others and answering questions. You can get in touch with an ambassador for specific questions you may have and they’ll be happy to help you.

If you want to become an ambassador and don’t know where to start or what specialty to take, you can follow the current ambassadors on social networks and see what they’re up to. Maybe you like creating videos or maybe you prefer helping in the forums. You can try a bit of everything until you find what you’re more passionate about.

As mentioned before, you first have to be a MuleSoft Mentor in order to have a chance of being a MuleSoft Ambassador. Once you’ve spent some months or years helping the community, you might have the chance to become an ambassador. MuleSoft Ambassadors are not normally nominated. There is a separate special process for selection. This is why you get coached by an actual ambassador when you’re a mentor – to understand the process better and get a plan to become one.

You can find the complete list of MuleSoft Ambassadors here: developer.mulesoft.com/community/ambassadors.

There are still more things to do even if you don’t want to be part of the meetups or the mentors/ambassadors program. Let’s now talk about the MuleSoft forums.

Getting help with the MuleSoft forums

The forums are primarily run by community members. People in the community can ask a question there and it will get answered in less than a day by – at least – one of the community members that are dedicated to helping others solve their questions.

A lot of the current MuleSoft Mentors and Ambassadors are active contributors in the forums. It’s a specialty for some of them to answer technical questions or clear some doubts about the products. This is one of the biggest sources of information for the community.

If you want to take advantage of this site, you can access help.mulesoft.com and create an account to start posting questions/answers. Please note that it is best to create an account with a personal email instead of your work email. If you change emails, you will no longer have access to your previous account’s points and you’ll have to start from scratch.

You can use an Anypoint Platform free trial account and even if it expires, you’ll still have access to your profile.

Now that we know where we can go with questions we may have and who we can look to for advice, let’s look at some interview tips to nail your first MuleSoft job.

Passing your interview

You chose your career path, you got the training, you got the certification, and you know where to go for help; now the only thing missing is to get your first MuleSoft job.

There is no magic formula that you can follow to nail technical interviews, especially since there are different roles and each company focuses on its own priorities. Maybe some companies are more interested in knowing that you can learn new technologies and not so much on your actual MuleSoft knowledge, or maybe they just ask specific MuleSoft questions.

For example, if you’re applying for an entry job as a MuleSoft developer, they might already know that you will only answer the questions you saw in your training but you don’t have practical experience in real-life projects. So, their questions will be more focused on your understanding of the basic topics instead of real-life complex projects. However, if you’re applying for a senior MuleSoft developer role, they’ll probably expect you to be an expert on MuleSoft’s products and have lots of hands-on experience. They won’t ask the same questions of a recent graduate and an experienced architect. There are some tips that we can give you so you can take these things into account.

Most of the questions people generally ask are related to what you saw/will see in the fundamentals training. Some of these are even part of the MCD – Level 1 certification exam. Besides finishing the training or passing the exam, we also recommend that you do some personal projects so you can get more familiar with the products and troubleshoot on your own.

Some general questions you may be asked in your interview may be the following:

1. What is the Mule runtime?
2. What are some differences between Mule 3 and Mule 4?
3. What is API-led connectivity?
4. What’s the difference between a RESTful and a SOAP web service?
5. What are the differences between a flow and a sub-flow?
6. What’s the Mule message structure in Mule 3 versus Mule 4?
7. What is MUnit?
8. What is a domain project?
9. What are the different ways to deploy an application into CloudHub?
10. What are the differences between CloudHub, on-premises, and Runtime Fabric?

As mentioned before, the questions will be different depending on the type of role you are interviewing for and the total years of experience you already have. The previous questions were some general/basic questions you may get asked for any role, but some examples for a senior or architect position might be the following:

1. When can you use the Object Store Connector and when should you use the Object Store REST APIs?
2. How can you use streaming in connectors such as File and HTTP?
3. What is the threading model in Mule 4?
4. How do you set up a CI/CD pipeline (such as Jenkins) for automated deployments?
5. What are the different encryptions you can achieve in Mule 4?
6. How can you create a custom policy and deploy it to Exchange?
7. What is the difference between a Dedicated Load Balancer (DLB) and a Shared Load Balancer (SLB)?
8. What’s the difference between a keystore and a truststore?
9. What’s the difference between a worker and a vCore?
10. How can you set up a different identity provider for Anypoint Platform?

Most of these questions are answered in the different types of training we previously listed. Some are found in the fundamentals training, some in the operations training, and some in the architect training. Depending on the role you’re applying for, we recommend you take a look at the specific training and study as if you were going to take a certification exam.

You should also self-reflect on how you learn best. Some people learn more when doing hands-on, practical exercises. Some people learn more by watching videos. Some people learn more by reading documentation. It is important that you figure out how to absorb this information so you really understand it and don’t just memorize it. This will help you in both your exams and your interviews.

Depending on the company, you may be able to ask them to provide a guide for the topics they’re going to go through in the interview. This will help you get a better idea of what the questions are going to be about so you can prepare days in advance. Don’t take your interviews lightly; always prepare and re-read tutorials/documentation or re-watch videos to give yourself a refresher. Even if they’re basic topics, you might forget the details sometimes.

Finally, you can use the networking side of LinkedIn or similar social networks to connect with professionals that are working at the company you’re applying to. You can get in touch with them and schedule a meeting to get a better sense of what the interview will be like. Maybe they have some specific pointers about their interview process that will be helpful for you to know beforehand. You can also get in touch with some MuleSoft Community members to ask for their help in having mock interviews. This is especially helpful if you haven’t been to interviews for a while and don’t quite remember the feeling of being in an interview. Having several mock interviews with others might help you be less nervous in the actual interview and you’ll get to practice some technical questions.

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about the different roles you can work in in the MuleSoft ecosystem. The official ones are architect, developer, and operations. We learned that there are some variants of these roles depending on the company, for example, designer.

We reviewed the four available certifications and why they might be important for your resume. There are two developer certifications: MuleSoft Certified Developer – Level 1 and Level 2. And there are also two architect certifications depending on your specialization: MuleSoft Certified Platform Architect or Integration Architect. Both are just Level 1 for now. We also mentioned some tips to get certified, such as taking the training and the practice exams.

We talked about the different official training you can find to expand your knowledge. There is specific training depending on your career path and/or specialization. Some of it comes with free vouchers to try the certification exam and some is just to show you more best practices or give you experience in certain products.

We understood a bit more about the MuleSoft Community and how you can be a part of it. We discussed how MuleSoft meetups work, how you can become a mentor or an ambassador, and how to take advantage of the forums to either ask questions or help others with theirs.

Finally, we listed some example questions you might get in your interview, depending on the role or experience level you’re looking for. We also talked about how each company is different and there’s no one-size-fits-all guide to guarantee you pass the interview. But you can get a better feeling of what kind of questions you might expect.

Questions

Take a moment to answer the following questions to serve as a recap of what you just learned in this chapter:

1. What are the four different career paths we talked about?
2. What are the four available certifications?
3. List at least three types of training for developers.
4. List at least two types of training for architects.
5. List at least three types of training for operations.
6. What are the three different official roles you can achieve in the community?
7. What is the URL to access the MuleSoft forums?
8. What is the best practice to create a new account for the forums?

Answers

1. Architect, developer, operations, business user
2. The four available certifications are:
   • MuleSoft Certified Developer – Level 1
   • MuleSoft Certified Developer – Level 2
   • MuleSoft Certified Platform Architect – Level 1
   • MuleSoft Certified Integration Architect – Level 1
3. The types of training for developers are:
   • Getting Started with Anypoint Platform
   • Anypoint Platform Development: Fundamentals
   • Anypoint Platform Development: API Design with RAML
   • Anypoint Platform Development: DataWeave
   • Anypoint Platform Development: Production-Ready Development Practices
   • Anypoint Platform Development: Production-Ready Integrations
4. The types of training for architects are:
   • Anypoint Platform Architecture: Application Networks
   • Anypoint Platform Architecture: Integration Solutions
   • Anypoint Platform Architecture: MuleSoft Accelerator for Healthcare
5. The types of training for operations are:
   • Anypoint Platform Operations: CloudHub
   • Anypoint Platform Operations: API Management
   • Anypoint Platform Operations: Runtime Fabric on Virtual Machines
   • Anypoint Platform Operations: Runtime Fabric on Self-Managed Kubernetes
   • Anypoint Platform Operations: Customer-Hosted Runtimes
   • Anypoint Platform Operations: API Community Manager
6. The different official roles you can achieve in the community are:
   • MuleSoft Meetup Group Leader
   • MuleSoft Mentor
   • MuleSoft Ambassador
7. The URL to access the MuleSoft forums is:

help.mulesoft.com

8. To only use your personal email address and not your work email address