Six months ago, I barely considered myself a developer. Today, I am officially a certified Umbraco Expert.
That sentence still feels strange to write. Not because the certification is impressive on paper, but because of how unlikely it all felt at the start. Before Umbraco, my coding experience amounted to a drowsy attempt at Lua (for Roblox game creation) and computer science in school. Anyone who has taken it will know that it teaches next to nothing compared to how software is actually built, maintained, and shipped.
This isn't about claiming that six months is all it takes to become an expert. It is about perspective, understanding, and what happens when learning is structured properly, supported by the right people, and grounded in real world work.
Where I actually started
When I began, I did not have a deep technical background. I understood basic programming concepts, but I had no real understanding of:
how production codebases are structured
how CMS driven sites are built properly
how backend and frontend concerns are separated
how security, performance, and maintainability fit together
Or anything related for that matter.
Tutorials taught me how to do one thing in isolation, but never why it mattered or how it fitted into an ecosystem like Umbraco. This is where many people get stuck. You can write code, but you do not yet think like a developer.
That distinction is important.
Learning for perspective, not just progress
One of the most important mindset shifts I made was stopping the idea of learning purely to move forward, and instead learning for perspective and understanding.
The Umbraco Junior Development Program was not something I rushed through to collect certificates. I deliberately treated it as a way to understand how Umbraco works under the hood, why certain patterns exist, and how decisions made early in a project affect everything later.
Many developers you see now who are certified chose to rush through all the courses, through the exams, and more often than not, use AI in the final exam. Not all, but comparing those who did similar methods to this, and those who took their time outweighs the scale for sure.
Now I'm not saying this is the improper way to take these courses, however I feel as though this gives you no where near as much beneficial value as it would to go through each exercise one by one, digesting the code, and taking your time.
Now I could've flew through the exams in a week, even the onboarders said so, however I wanted to get the most out of the program as I could, and so that I did.
That approach changed how I learned:
instead of copying code, I questioned why it existed
instead of focusing on speed, I focused on clarity
instead of aiming to pass exams, I aimed to understand systems
Ironically, this slower and more deliberate approach is what accelerated my progress the most.
Who should take this course?
In my opinion, I think that if you want to learn more about Umbraco, no matter your skill level, this is the right thing for you.
The only limiting factor is money.
Now while the course is great, it is also very costly if I am being honest, and for some it is purely not worth it, and that completely makes sense. I got access to the courses through the junior development program, which my company Simon Antony Ltd paid for through the Umbraco Silver Partnership credits, and it was 100% worth it for me, and the company as I am able to carry out tickets, and work for clients without needing assistance for every line of code I write, or every block list I change.
However with all that being said, the course is great for those who are new to Umbraco, and those who have worked with it for a long time, as I learned a lot from it, and for my boss, he knew most of the answers to the questions I asked, however there was a lot of things he didn't know, and he's been coding with Umbraco pretty much since it released.
The role of the Umbraco junior development program
The Umbraco Junior Development Program deserves specific credit because it removes one of the biggest barriers for new developers:
Randomness.
Instead of guessing what to learn next, the program provides a clear path. It introduces concepts in a logical order, reinforces them through practice, and ties them directly to real Umbraco projects.
Key benefits of the course include:
a structured learning path that mirrors real development
exposure to best practices early, before bad habits form
a focus on understanding rather than shortcuts
alignment with the Umbraco certification standards
Most importantly, it teaches you how Umbraco is intended to be used. That alone saves months of confusion and rework.
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The Process
The process / journey to become a certified Umbraco Expert wasn't quick and easy, that's for sure. And at times it felt like I was getting nowhere. However in the end it was all worth it.
Excluding the fundamentals course, and the professional exam, there's 4 courses you'll need to complete;
Security
Extending the Backoffice
Umbraco and MVC
Application Integration
After completing all four of these, you will be able to take the Expert examination.
Security
This course was the one I was personally looking forwards to the most. This is because I have always said that I would like to know as much as I can about security, and originally I wanted to specialise more in security.
The course taught me all about how to protect my site from all sorts of attacks, how to protect my data, and my "customers" data, as well as how to hack into my site ( to know how to protect it of course) and inject "viruses" (The harlem shake script) to our own site.
I found that this course was everything which I expected, and more.
Extending The Backoffice
The Extending the Backoffice course was one of the most practically useful courses for me, as it showed how far Umbraco can be utilised beyond content editing.
This course focuses on customising the Umbraco backoffice to better suit real world and business needs. It covered creating custom dashboards, sections, trees, and property editors, as well as working with Lit, Typescript and Vite in the context of Umbraco.
What stood out most was learning how to improve the editors experience properly, rather than working around limitations. Instead of forcing editors into awkward workflows, you learn how to build tools that feel almost necessary for Umbraco and those that are intuitive to use.
I found this course particularly valuable because it closes the gap between backend development and UX. It is not just about making something work, but about making it work well for the people who use it daily, and to relieve yourselves, the editors and the users of the stress and hassle of having to go through everything to change 1 small thing.
I would strongly recommend this course to anyone building with Umbraco, as it teaches you how to add real value beyond templating and content models.
Umbraco and MVC
The Umbraco and MVC course was where a lot of concepts finally clicked into place for me.
This course dives into how Umbraco sits on top of .Net Core, and how requests move through the system from routing to controllers, models, and views. It helped me understand not just how to write Umbraco code, but why it is structured the way it is.
Topics like Surface Controllers, Render Controllers, ViewModels, and partial views were covered in depth, alongside best practices for keeping code clean and maintainable.
Before this course, I could build Umbraco pages. After it, I understood how to architect them properly.
This course is essential for anyone who wants to move beyond baseline Umbraco and into writing scalable, testable, and well structured solutions. It also makes debugging far easier, as you gain a clear mental model of what Umbraco is doing under the hood.
Application Integration
The Application Integration course focuses on connecting Umbraco to the wider ecosystem it often operates within.
This includes working with APIs, third party services, authentication flows, and external systems. It highlights the reality that Umbraco rarely exists in isolation, especially in larger or more complex projects. For example, many e-commerce websites will integrate shopify, many "office" businesses will integrate HubSpot, etc, but this course shows you in detail how to integrate these different services into your Umbraco instance.
The course teaches you how to safely and cleanly integrate external data sources while keeping security, performance, and maintainability in mind. It also reinforces good practices around dependency injection, configuration, and separation of concerns.
I found this course particularly useful for understanding how Umbraco fits into enterprise level solutions. It shifts your mindset from building websites to building applications, with Umbraco acting as a central platform rather than just a CMS.
Not only that, but it opens your eyes to other solutions, which could save you thousands of pounds per year.
For developers looking to work on more advanced projects, this course is invaluable.
The Exam
I'll be completely honest, I was scared stiff once I finished all of the courses. All I could think about was "what if I don't pass it" "what if i'm not ready" but in the end, they're all what if's, and they were all void anyways.
All of the stress I worked up just made it harder for me to be honest. You have 60 minutes to answer 60 questions, which sounds daunting, and it is. However, all questions are multiple choice, and as long as you have been following along with the course, you'll be fine.
To revise / practice for the exam, for a few hours, I opened 4 tabs with the courses on them, one for each course, and rather than going through all of the courses again, I went to each and every exercise course by course, and completed the knowledge checks, and this helped more than I could imagine. A lot of the questions in the exam are very similar to the ones in the knowledge checks.
My Final Thoughts
Overall, the junior development program, and these courses has been amazing for me, and they have provided me with tons of insight for Umbraco, and what I can do within. I will hopefully be taking the Master course soon, and with luck, I can get this done as soon as possible, hopefully before the end of February, so if you want to keep updated, don't be shy to connect with me on LinkedIn.