8 Must Have Hard Skills For Every PHP Developer

Introduction

How does it feel when you go and buy a car at an excessive rate only to realize that it has defective machinery? It feels horrible to realize that you spent millions on a dud car. Obliviously getting inept PHP developers for your project evokes the same sense of misery.

Today, you can find over 6.1 million PHP developers in the world. However, assuming that all of them have a sound grasp of the technology is a folly you can not afford while recruiting. Instances exist where candidates lie about their skills, get a job, and deliver non-satisfactory work. Such a scenario means you have spent your resources on liability and treated your project carelessly. And this epiphany calls for the hiring process to start again. And such a situation leads you to repeatedly spend your “Working On The Project” time recruiting PHP developers.

Knowing which hard skills to scrutinize while interviewing candidates can help you make sound decisions. Here we have compiled the eight must-have hard skills for PHP Developers for you to refer to in case of need!

What are the responsibilities of PHP developers?

When you hire someone for this profile, your selected candidate should be the one who can do the following things:

1. They should be able to easily choose the most effective tools, applications, and programming languages for your project.
2. Creating website apps should be a piece of cake for them and should not take much time.
3. In case compatibility issues arise with other languages and among different browsers and platforms, your PHP developers must be able to identify and troubleshoot them.
4. PHP developers should be willing to explore different architectural considerations related to the system design process, including database design, performance, and usability.
5. Communication skills require the utmost attention as your developers must interact and work with other teams and managers. They need to do so to set priorities, solve problems and discover the best solutions possible. Thus, you should also ensure whether they can express their ideas and thoughts effortlessly and completely.
6. PHP developers must recommend performance improvement ways and develop plans to keep your website updated.
7. The last responsibility requires PHP developers to stay abreast of all the latest programming practices and technologies. 

Thus, you can expect your chosen developers to perform the abovementioned tasks. But before you are in a position to ensure that your PHP developers have it in them to perform the above-written activities, you must know what you need to look for. Hence, we list the eight must-have skills to look for while hiring PHP developers below. 

What are the 8 must-have hard skills for every PHP developer?

You must check the credibility of your candidates on the following parameters:

JavaScript

PHP developers must know how to use JavaScript. You can evaluate your interviewee’s knowledge of JavaScript by ensuring that they could or already have had:

1. Developed JavaScript code for site validation purposes.
2. Used advanced JavaScript techniques and successfully delivered innovative features.
3. Successfully designed forms and developed dynamic front-end validation with the help of JavaScript.
4. Written JavaScript code to perform client-side validations.
5. Used PowerShell to develop automated scripts to execute JavaScript code and manipulate websites.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the standard language used for developing web pages. Since it is a formatting system, it describes the layout of your website’s web pages. You can check your candidates’ proficiency in HTML by checking that they have done or could do the following:

1. Used responsive design and mobile-friendly HyperText Markup Language.
2. Worked on Ajax, HTML, MYSQL, PHP, and WordPress on Linux and Windows operating systems.
3. Employed Bootstrap to design and implement Cascading Style Sheets, HyperText Markup Language, and JavaScript frameworks to develop responsive, mobile-first templates and websites.
4. Successfully designed and developed web content in W3C standards to maintain cross-browser compatibility using HyperText Markup Language standards.
5. Bought domain name and maintained files using FileZilla FTP software.

Database

PHP programming heavily involves massive collections of data resources and information. Thus, PHP developers must know about the various PHP frameworks in detail.

You can check the following things in your candidates:

1. Their knowledge regarding several databases such as Oracle, MongoDB, Postgresql, MySQL, etc.
2. Whether they can integrate different methodologies.

Framework

Having a sound grasp of the core PHP language is mandatory. However, your interviewees must also know other programming languages and frameworks such as:

1. CodeIgniter framework
2. Zend
3. FatFree
4. Laravel
5. CakePHP

GIT

GIT is also one of the eight must-have hard skills for PHP developers. Thus, you can keep in mind the following pointers to see whether they are good at using GIT:

1. Have your candidates used Jenkins java plugin development, code configurations like Git, IT provisioning recipes, etc.?
2. Have they provisioned in development with vagrant and FTP clients and deployed with Git in production?
3. Do your interviewees know how to develop and implement GIT repositories and manage software releases?
4. Can they use the Git repository to automate code management between production, test, and development environments?
5. Do your future PHP developers know how to develop custom bash scripts required to deploy code from the Git repository onto stage and production servers?

Web Designing Skills

Dealing with PHP scripts is not the only thing your developers must know; they should also know how to perform the duties of a web designer. That means you must check whether your PHP web developer knows about the following things:

1. Web design principles
2. How to create the right look and feel of a website.
3. User interface knowledge
4. Networking skills
5. CSS customization
6. Chrome dev tools
7. System design process
8. Front-end web page

In-depth Technical Skills

A PHP web developer must possess problem-solving skills besides having in-depth knowledge of programming languages, MVC frameworks, web development languages, and core PHP.

This skill is essential as a problem-solving approach helps developers troubleshoot errors and bugs with the help of the right technical skills (Coding and web designing skills).

jQuery

A library named jQuery makes the usage of JavaScript on websites much more uncomplicated. It wraps a lot of standard activities into methods and lets you call the entire piece of code with just one line!

AJAX calls and DOM manipulation also get simplified with the help of jQuery. Thus, it would help if you made it a point to check your candidates’ knowledge regarding jQuery.

To assess your PHP developers’ jQuery knowledge, you can adhere to the following points.

1. Have they developed dynamic front-end validation using jQuery?
2. Do they have experience developing and designing a jQuery library?
3. Can your potential PHP developers use the jQuery validation library for form validation?
4. Did they ever use jQuery to enhance user interaction and form functionality?
5. Can they develop AJAX based web-based user interaction framework by employing jQuery?

Conclusion

Only a discerning eye can distinguish between average and proficient PHP developers. However, most of the time, the people who need to recruit a PHP web developer are not from this field. Therefore, they either need to surf the Internet to learn about the must-have skills or rely on other agencies to guide them.

This blog compiled the hard skills a PHP developer must know by telling you in detail what you can ask them while assessing their credibility. 

Hiring PHP developers, training them for a specific period, and then giving them the task might take longer than you could afford. And you can avoid the entire process by approaching a web app development company like AppsRhino that can provide you with the right PHP developers.

AppsRhino is a company that boasts meticulous PHP developers who always put their heart and soul into their work. You can always leverage AppsRhino's PHP developers for your venture by contacting us today to get your app development process going!