5 Tips for Passing Microsoft Certifications

I decided to use the holiday period, whilst it's a little less crazy in the office to do some exam certifications. Not the ones I have to do, the ones I want to do. I knocked off the Azure and O365 Fundamentals exams last year, but have been putting off doing more. I am an expert-level procrastinator, and there are always interesting things I could be building (mostly bots, but currently a website) - so it's been longer than it should be.

But, new years resolutions are upon us and 2020 was a write off. So... here are my tips:

1. Do a certification regularly (form a habit): Once a quarter is a reasonable target. Continuous learning is something you should be integrating into your modern workplace routine, to keep your insights fresh and to build enthusiasm and expertise for what you do, but if you don't do the exams regularly - then the idea of them becomes bigger and more terrifying the longer you leave it.

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2. Practice makes Perfect: The is a logic to exam questions, for the most part they are not designed to trick you and the more practice tests you undertake, the more you start to see the patterns in the wording. So if you don't know the answer to a question - Don't panic. Mark the question for review and come back to it later when your brain is calmer. And then read the question slowly, pick out the keywords - and see if you can work out the best answer by process of elimination. Which leads me on to...

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3. Complete all the questions you know first. It will build confidence and give your brain a chance to slow down and think a little. After you have done all the ones you are 100% sure of, you can count how many more you need to pass - and then go slowly through the rest, reasoning out the answers logically. If you only have a handful of questions you are 100% sure of, you either weren't ready for this exam.... or you were super unlucky. The questions you get today are not the same ones the others in your exam get - so if you fail today, it is not a reflection of you being less able than them - maybe you had different questions, and sometimes 1 or 2 in a domain you love can make the difference.

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4. If you fail - book back in for the resit. Do not let fear chase you away. You have already done a bunch of prep for this exam, continue to build on it and go back in better equipped for the next round. No-one ever walked out of the birth canal. Tiger Woods practiced hitting golf balls into a net every day until his arms were too tired to hold the club. He did that in his garage from when he was old enough to swing a club. Expertise is not a talent, it is a skill that is learnt - through practice, through repetition and by doing a little bit of it every day until it becomes easier. Those experts who make it look easy, were not born coding - and in the beginning, their code was ugly, and dirty. But it is only by writing ugly, dirty code do we come to learn what beautiful, clean, efficient code looks like. Perfection only gives you insight if it comes from imperfection. Light only brings clarity from darkness.

5. Download the exam skills outline. It tells you what topics they will be judging you on, and what percentage of the exam will be on that topic. You can tell from that what is considered important. When you do your practice tests, they should split out the questions into those same topic outlines. They should also give you recommended reading if you do the test in the mode that allows you to reveal the answers. So you can reveal the answer, read what is right and what is wrong - and if you still don't get it, click on the link and go deeper. Do that for a topic you find difficult. I like to draw out a mind-map for those topics I struggle to grasp. From the practice test I see that I completely understand the guiding principals of AI and also everything you need to know about Conversational AI but the algorithms for machine learning are more difficult for me. From experience I know that we live those guiding principals as part of the Microsoft Culture, and I'm always building bots... so those things that I do, I know. Those things I have only read about, have not sunk in yet. So I'll probably need to do some labs, not just read about the concepts if I want to be sure I have it.

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I'm doing my AI Fundamentals and my AI Associate Certifications next month, if you want to look at the resources I studied then check out my AI Fundamentals Prep here (it's a Live repo so keep checking back for more notes and resources), do give it a star:

AI-100 Prep here (it's a Live repo so keep checking back for more notes and resources), do give it a star:

Q: What are you studying now and what would be your top tip to help your community?

Michelle Sandford works for Microsoft. She is the Chairman of the Australian Computer Society in WA, a Tedx Speaker, a Tech Girl Superhero and one of MCV's 50 Most Influential Women in Games. You can follow Michelle on LinkedIn for her articles; on Twitter for events, interesting shares and occasional commentary in 256 characters, Facebook to see where she is presenting next, YouTube for Video's and Instagram for the life of a Microsoftie in photographs.