Job Ready

PHP is hired into a few fairly separate tracks, and a reviewer reads your resume through the lens of the one they are hiring for. "PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS" says nothing they can check; every applicant writes it. What reads as evidence is the working ecosystem around the language for that track, a project that uses it, and a number that shows it held up.

• Name the versions. "PHP 8.3, Laravel 11" tells a reviewer you write modern PHP; no version, or "PHP 5", reads as legacy work, which is a different job.
• Every bullet: action verb, what was built, the tools in parentheses, and a number where one exists: response time before and after, queries removed, jobs per minute, test coverage added, revenue handled.
• Mirror the posting. If it says "Laravel" and "Eloquent ORM", use those words, not "PHP MVC framework". An ATS matches strings, not synonyms.
• Projects above education with under three years of experience. Link the repository, and the live URL for anything deployed.

Then check it against a real posting instead of guessing: paste both into the ATS resume checker. It scores keyword coverage against that specific job, flags formatting that breaks parsers, and shows which lines a reviewer's eye actually lands on.

Run the resume through this list before every application. Each item is something an ATS or a reviewer checks in the first pass, before a single repository is opened.

• Plain, single-column formatting: no tables, text boxes or icons. Parsers frequently drop content inside them.
• A skills line grouped by category (Languages · Frameworks · Data · Testing · DevOps), with the PHP and framework versions stated.
• At least one bullet that shows depth, not syntax: an N+1 fixed, a slow query indexed, a job moved to a queue, a PHP version upgrade done with Rector, a security issue closed.
• Testing named explicitly: PHPUnit or Pest, feature tests, factories, PHPStan or Psalm. PHP teams increasingly treat untested, untyped code as unfinished.
• Three linked projects, each with a README and a one-command start. A project that cannot be run is a project a reviewer skips.
• The certificate with its verification ID, once, under Certifications. The official Laravel or Symfony certifications go on the same line if you have them.
• One page under five years of experience. No photo, no fonts or graphics an ATS parser was not built to read.

PHP reviewers look for the same thing in a portfolio that they look for in a pull request: does this person build software the way a team does? One production-shaped project beats five tutorial apps. The three projects below cover the largest share of PHP postings, and each maps to specific modules of this handbook. (Aiming at WordPress agencies instead? Replace the third project with a custom plugin that adds a Gutenberg block and a REST endpoint, with tests.)

1. 1
   A Laravel or Symfony API with a real database, tests and Docker

   Pick a domain with real rules: bookings with no double-booking, an inventory with stock reservations, expense claims with approval states. PHP 8.3+, strict types, form requests or DTOs for validation, enums for statuses, readonly value objects, eager loading on every list endpoint, consistent JSON errors (422 with field errors, 404, 409). A database transaction and a unique constraint guard the rule that matters. Pest or PHPUnit feature tests against a real database, PHPStan at a high level, and a docker-compose.yml that starts PHP-FPM, Nginx and the database with one command. Then load-test it and write down one thing you fixed. Shows: Modules 06, 08, 10 and 12.

2. 2
   A SaaS feature with queues, scheduled jobs and email

   Something that does slow work in the background: an invoicing tool that generates PDFs and emails them, a newsletter sender, a CSV import that validates and loads 100,000 rows. Show what makes it hard: queued jobs that are idempotent (running twice is harmless), retries with back-off and a failed-jobs view, a scheduled command (schedule:run or Symfony Scheduler), Redis for the queue and cache, rate limiting on the public endpoints, and a generator or lazy() to stream large data with bounded memory. Put a number in the README, such as rows imported per second. Shows: Modules 09, 13 and the mid-level questions in 15.

3. 3
   A Composer package other people can install

   A small, focused library published on Packagist: a money and currency value object, a validation rule set for your country's tax IDs, a client for a public API, or a Laravel package with a service provider. PSR-4 autoloading, semantic versioning with tags, a test matrix across two or three PHP versions in GitHub Actions, PHPStan passing, and a README with install and usage. It shows you can design an API for other developers, which is exactly what a senior reviewer looks for. Shows: Modules 07 and 12.

PHP runs a large share of the web, and the hiring follows. Product companies and SaaS startups build on Laravel for its speed of development, often with Vue or React on the front end. Enterprise and public-sector teams, especially in Europe, favour Symfony, Drupal and long-lived, strongly typed codebases. E-commerce is a big employer: Magento (Adobe Commerce), Shopware, WooCommerce and Sylius shops, plus the integrations around them (payments, ERP, shipping). Digital agencies hire for WordPress, Drupal and Laravel across many client projects. And many established companies run large PHP platforms (marketplaces, media, booking, fintech back offices) that need maintenance, upgrades and new features. Remote and contract work is unusually common for PHP.

Read a posting's tool list as the interview syllabus and map it back to the module that covers it:

• Read the verbs. "Maintain", "support", "enhance" usually means an existing codebase, often older, so reading unfamiliar code and error logs (Module 11) is the real job. "Design", "own", "lead" means the senior questions in Module 15.
• Check the versions. "PHP 5.6, CodeIgniter" and "PHP 8.3, Laravel 11" are different jobs with different interviews. Many postings are the first one with an upgrade planned, which is a strong opening for someone who knows both.
• Years of experience are softer than they look. A posting asking for "2 to 4 years" regularly interviews a strong junior with a production-shaped portfolio. The API project above is what gets you past the filter.
• Watch for the second skill. "PHP and Vue", "PHP and React", "PHP and AWS", "Laravel and Livewire" are the common pairs. The pair tells you what to learn next.

Match every posting against this table, then paste it with your resume into the ATS checker to see which of its tools are not on the page yet.

The PHP certification exam draws 25 questions from a bank covering Modules 01–14: 35 minutes, 70% to pass. The questions are phrased the way interviewers phrase them, and the wrong answers are the misconceptions this handbook warned about: trusting ==, expecting empty("0") to be false, forgetting that array_filter keeps keys, or believing $a + $b appends two lists. Pass it and a SolutionGigs PHP Programming certificate is issued with your name, score, date and a verifiable ID.

1. 1
   Check the ticks

   The handbook landing page shows every lesson completed so far. Anything unticked in Modules 01–14 is a question you might miss; read it first.

2. 2
   Sit the exam

   Sign in with Google so the certificate carries the right name. It can be retaken; the paper is drawn fresh from the bank each time.

3. 3
   Put the certificate where it counts

   LinkedIn → Licenses & certifications, with the ID. Resume → Certifications, one line. GitHub profile README → one line with the link. The ID is what lets a recruiter verify it.

4. 4
   Then the funnel

   ATS checker against a real posting → fix the gaps it finds → apply with the portfolio repository in the first line of the application.

Your next step depends on the job you want, not on what is fashionable. PHP developers almost always work next to a database and a JavaScript front end, so those are the usual first additions.

Keep the problem-solving muscle warm with graded problems in SQL practice, since database questions appear in almost every PHP interview loop, and revisit Module 15 the week before each interview.