From: Peter Hickman Date: 2011-09-22T21:52:13+09:00 Subject: Re: What can persuade you to hire Junior Ruby devs with significant PHP experience? When we were recruiting for a Rails position PHP (in fact any dynamic language) was fine if it also came with experience, I would guess that 7 years PHP should mean some good experience. If the rest of your CV panned out you would have got an interview. Certification would have counted for nothing. The truth is that after 7 years as a PHP developer you shouldn't need to prove anything other than you understand web development as a whole rather than just programming. If anyone with 7 years programming experience is still s 'PHP programmer' rather than a 'web developer' or just a plain programmer then that would be a bad thing. So honestly there is little you can do but polish up your CV so that you stress that you are a web developer (list your accomplishments and skills you have developed - databases, web servers, memcached, xml, javascript .. the list just goes on) who just happens to have 7 years of PHP under their belt. That 7 years should mean something, you are no longer a code monkey, you have been programming longer than most startups have existed (the first Twitter message was 2006, the company was founded in 2008 - you have been a web developer longer than Twitter has existed for). Make sure that you don't undervalue yourself, a programmer with that much experience should take to a new language without breaking sweat. Your knowledge of web development is your asset not your knowledge about the dark corners of a specific programming language.