Today, the IBM Quantum and Qiskit team announced the IBM Quantum Developer Certification — the first-ever certification program for quantum computing. This certification demonstrates mastery of foundational skills that are critical for building and running quantum programs using Qiskit, the most used quantum computing software development kit in our industry.
This is an exciting opportunity for the overall quantum community — the ability to show potential employers that you’re proficient in programming a quantum computer, and the ability for employers themselves to demonstrate that they’re building a quantum-ready workforce. But this is especially exciting to the Qiskit community, whose many members have devoted countless hours to programming on this software development kit simply because it’s really cool.
Our team also understands that costs associated with Certification tests can be prohibitive, particularly for test-takers outside the US. In accordance with our commitment to build a global and diverse quantum computing workforce, we are providing vouchers to the first 1000 community members as they take the test for the first time. Those who are interested in this opportunity can fill out this form. We hope to extend availability of these vouchers in the future as we build more Certifications.
Preparing for the IBM Quantum Developer Certification Test
We figure that plenty of Qiskitters will be looking to take the certification exam, so we’ve put together a sneak peak of the exam’s structure, what’s going to be on it, and how to study for it.
The test is going to be a 60-question exam, in English, offered on the Pearson VUE platform. The goal of the test is to certify that those who pass it can define, execute, and visualize quantum circuits using Qiskit, implement single and multi-qubit gates and understand their effects on quantum circuits, and leverage the fundamental features of Qiskit in order to write quantum programs. Here’s a sample question:
Prior to the exam, you should understand how to create, execute, and visualize the results of quantum circuits. You should have a working knowledge of how to model quantum states, and how to evolve them using complex vectors and matrices. You should have a working knowledge of the Pauli matrices, of quantum state measurement probabilities, and familiarity with the common circuits that produce Bell states. It’s worth checking out both the IBM Quantum Composer and IBM Quantum Lab, which some Qiskitters may not have checked out before.
As you prepare, we recommend that you study the Learn Quantum Computation using Qiskit textbook, focusing heavily on chapters 1 and 2. Then, we suggest you review the tutorials on the IBM Quantum Lab, specifically those on circuits and simulators. Finally, we expect you to take a deep dive into circuits, simulators, and other topics. Here’s a recommended path, to take on your dive, with links.
- You should study quantum registers, including the difference between classical and quantum registers, how to construct single and multiple qubit registers, and how to measure quantum registers into classical registers.
- You should know how to install Qiskit.
- You should be able to define a quantum circuit, represent qubit states, and visualize circuits. You should be able to apply single and multi-qubit gates, use the barrier operation, calculate the circuit depth, and extend quantum circuits. You should be able to execute a circuit, and understand quantum and classical registers as well as measurement.
- You should understand operators as well as fidelity.
- You should be able to use simulators to run a quantum circuit. This includes returning the histogram, statevector, and unitary of an experiment, which simulators are available, and how to access each simulator backend.
- You should understand OpenQASM and how to employ it in Qiskit. This includes returning an OpenQASM string for a circuit and reading a QASM file.
- You should know what backends are and how to work with them. This includes a general overview of the backends and monitoring the status of a job.
- Finally, you should have an advanced understanding of how to visualize the results of your circuits. This includes drawing the circuit, plotting the data, plotting a Bloch vector and multivector, plotting a Qsphere, plotting a density matrix, and plotting a gate map with error rates.
This might sound like a lot — but the purpose of this exam is to ensure that those who receive a certification have a comprehensive understanding of how to program a quantum computer using Qiskit. As members of the Qiskit community, you’re uniquely positioned to take this test as active users and contributors to this code. We hope you’ll sign up!
