Tips and Tricks for AWS Certificates
Like everyone, I also thought my career was headed in the right direction. After five years as a backend developer, I found watching on assigned tasks and working on similar assignments day by day very monotonous. The offer on LinkedIn was shown to me at that time, approximately three years ago, where AWS cloud was demanded, and it was then when it started to be interesting for me. We were sitting and waiting for the beginning of the class with my friend from high school, and when we read about various clouds we looked at each other and asked the typical question, said by Jeremy Clarkson in Top Gear: “How hard it can be?”
We gave ourselves a challenge based on the mentioned question. We tried to pass the certificate in 2 weeks. Concretely, it was about the certificate AWS Solution Architect Associate. We were preparing for the certificate only for two weeks, and since we did not know anything about cloud before, you can guess how it turned out. Neither of us passed the certificate but the opposite friend I did not give up, and so I will share my technique in this article, how I reached the top after the failure. This top is getting 11 certificates in order using the same technique. I am not saying it is the best technique, but in my opinion, it certainly works, and one will not give anything for trying.
My technique is based on the first passing of the course you are preparing for. Whether it is a certificate by AWS, Azure, or Google, many good and quality courses on udemy, cloudguru, or other sites, need to return every time. Let us go to the questions technique. My technique is based on the division of questions into four categories. The first category questions, which when I read, I automatically know the answer. The first category is also a proper justification of wrong answers and the necessity to know all the services mentioned in the question. I marked the first category with green color every time, and I never returned to it again. It is useless to waste time with questions/questions I can answer even if I wake up in the morning.
The second category of questions. The second category means that I knew to answer the question, but I did not know to justify some of the options, or I did not know a service mentioned in the questions. Regarding this type of question, I wrote a service that was not clear an option I did not understand. Based on this, I went back to the service on the official site of Amazon, or I opened the course I was preparing with. Even if I tried to catch and understand everything during the first passing of the certificate, it is sometimes simply not possible, and it is necessary to go back to it. I marked this category with blue, and I only proceeded with it again because of the proper justification of wrong answers.
I marked the third category with orange color. This type of question is widespread with me, and I could correctly justify 50% of wrong answers, but I did not know to choose the correct answer from the remaining ones. I often experience a similar situation with certificates, but you probably know how it goes. I applied a similar principle in answer justification again. I went through the service I did not know or was not sure with again, and subsequently, I watched the video where the mentioned theme of question is being solved.
The fourth category occurred in 5 to 10 % of cases. Sometimes I did not know to answer the question after reading, and ABCD options were not helping me at all. I will return to those questions, but after the very first marking of the question into four types, I will tell you that after proceeding with two questions, the fourth category became the question of the third or second category.
The basic of my review was the identification of services and set-outs. The identification and repeated service testing on the AWS console is always an ideal solution, even if sometimes quite expensive. Back to the category. The second going through the questions went as follows: green, blue, orange, and red. These colors symbolize the first, second, third, and fourth categories. Everything was evident with the first category, so I did not go through it. The second category forced me to go through the services and methods I did not understand in the question of a given type, and it became the first category question over time. Therefore, I also studied the third type category that became the second type category over time, and it was followed by a similar principle also for category 4. After going through each category three times, it looked as follows:
- experiment: 25 questions (1. category), 15 questions (2. category), 17 questions (3. category), 8 questions (4. category)
- experiment: 35 questions (1. category), 20 questions (2. category), 8 questions (3. category), 2 questions (4. category)
- experiment: 50 questions (1. category), 12 questions (2. category), 4 questions (3. category), 0 questions (4. category)
I did not go through the questions four times anymore in most cases, but if I wanted to be 100 % sure, I even went through all the questions five times. I used three types of sources for the 3. stage in the majority of cases which you can find in my next article, and which are, in my opinion, sufficient for passing the certificate, of course, including logical thinking.
If you liked the article or have any questions, do not hesitate to give like, follow, or feel free to comment if you need other information. I wish you good luck in passing the certificate.
