Planning for a certification exam

A few days ago I was talking via “messaging” on LinkedIn with someone that wanted to pursue some certifications. The biggest issue she had was the planning part. When I explain how I did it, she found it amazing, for me it was just “normal” to do it like that.

So how do I do it?

In my example I was looking at the “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate” certification.

The steps I’m taking:

• Look for a good course on the topic. Mostly I will be looking at Udemy for this, but there are of course a lot of other options like acloudguru.com ,digitalcloud.training, freecodecamp.org  or datacumulus.com
• Once you found the course you want to use for your study, analyze how it is structured and how long it “officially” takes (I mean the number of hours in video).
• I try to study at least 1 hour per day once I’m in study/certification mode. The course I already purchased in the past, is listed as being 26 hours. So 26 hours at 1 hour per day would mean that I would need 26 days to get through the course.
• Using Outlook (web or app) I create a recurring appointment, for 1 hour every week day and this for a total of 26 occurrences. (26 as the course takes 26 hours). As I wanted to start with the study on May 18th, this means that the last day of the study would be June 22nd. The “name” of the appointment is in this example SAA-C02 (that the code of the certification exam)
• I prefer to take my certification exams on a Sunday (around 10am), this means than in theory I could go for an exam on June 27th, however I do leave some extra time “just in case”, the next option is July 4th.
• I scheduled the exam for July 4th. In my agenda July 3rd in 100% used for the exam preparation and on the 4th it will be from 8am until the start of the exam also some extra prep.
• Result is that based on “just” using the weekdays for study I still have an extra 8 days. And don’t forget I only used the weekdays until now….if I add the weekends to it, I have 12 more days.
• About 7 days before the actual exam is planned, I have an extra “appointment” in my agenda, to evaluate if the date of the exam is still a real option or not. If not, reschedule the exam.

That’s the planning part, the easy part 😊

Once you start with the study I do think it’s important to keep good track of your progress.

For that I’m using again using my agenda in Outlook. 

Each time I’m studying I will change the subject of that specific “study”-appointment to “SAA-CO2 # section x-y of z”. Were the x-y are the section that I did study, the z is the total number of section. This works fine if the sections are less than 1h (as I normally only study for about an hour). However if you have several sections that take longer than 1h, you can use what I would call the “topics”. In the course that I will be using, there are 31 sections, for a total of 344 topics. In that case instead of pointing to the section, you could point to the topics, that would give something like “SAA-C02 # topic x-y of z” (SAA-C02 # topic 1-17 of 344). This is a way for you to actually see that you are going forward in your study.

If there is a day that you did schedule (in the agenda) to study and didn’t do it, simply remove that one appointment from your agenda, and add one extra at the end (remember you had spare days).

Same if you did study on a day that you didn’t plan to study, just add it to the agenda, and remove one appointment at the end.

But remember this is just the study part. You will need some time to practice too. That is also one of the reasons I keep the studying limited to weekdays, I can practice in the weekend.

The above is with an AWS certification exam, but you can use the same logic for any other certification exam, AWS, Microsoft, Google,….

Good luck with your certification journey….