With MS Ignite finishing up, I thought it now a good time to try and consolidate tips and advice from the sessions that will help with your exam preparation.

Give yourself a deadline

One of the recurring themes in all the Exam Prep sessions was to give yourself a deadline. Booking the exam for 2-3 months in the future means you have a hard end-date. Without this, it is harder to prioritize your learning over other life distractions.

Enroll in an on-demand course

My advice is to enroll in an on-demand course to set your own pace. Once you know your deadline you can set up a study schedule and march towards the exam. Check out Skylines Academy’s portfolio of top-rated Azure courses here. It’s also a good idea to opt-into the membership if you’re going to study for more than one exam.

Use Microsoft Learn resources

Microsoft has produced a lot of great resources to help with your learning. Within the Microsoft Learn site, they provide a course overview and links to their documentation. They also offer access to learning sandboxes for specific tasks for free. So if you are learning on a budget, you can use these sandbox environments to practice without incurring any charges on your subscription.

Understand your objective domain

For each exam Microsoft supply an objective domain or blueprint. This gives you an indication of the subject matter covered and what skills are being measured. Below is the high-level overview of the AZ 103 exam.  

·       Manage Azure subscriptions and resources (15-20%)

·       Implement and manage storage (15-20%)

·       Deploy and manage virtual machines (VMs) (15-20%)

·       Configure and manage virtual networks (30-35%)

·       Manage identities (15-20%)

The percentages are supplied to give you an idea of the number of questions you find in the various areas. On the Microsoft Learn site they also supply a more comprehensive PDF that gives you more details on what is measured in each of the competency areas.

The current AZ-103 PDF can be found here

The certification objective domains are reviewed every two months. If you are planning to take more than a couple of months, you will need to check the objective domains to ensure there have been no changes or additions to the course syllabus.

Before starting revising for the exam you can use the objective domain to assess your knowledge against the various areas. Build5nines.com has created a useful assessment tool  for AZ 103, but this could easily be modified for any of the other Microsoft exams.

Don’t worry about Preview features.

During your study, you will learn the various features and resources available in Azure. You will also notice a wide array of Preview features available for many of the resources. Although available for you to play around with and get a feel for the extra features, these Preview features are not included in the exam.

Answer all the questions

With all Microsoft exams there is no negative marking. If you get a question wrong, you don’t lose any marks. Therefore if you do not know the answer it is better to guess than leave the answer blank. You can also get partial credit for multi-stage answers even if you don’t get the entirely correct answer you can still get credit for the parts of the question you do get right.

The pass mark for Microsoft exams is 700 out 1000, so even if you do not get all the questions right, you still have a chance of passing.

Azure CLI interactive mode

Mike Pfeiffer, mentioned this on his Podcast for cloudskill.fm , when taking the exam if you forget a PowerShell or Azure CLI command knowing how to use help can save you valuable time.

Within the Cloud console, you can enable the interactive mode of the Azure CLI with the command “az interactive”. Once enabled, the cloud shell will look similar to this, giving you additional information about the commands and available arguments.

Ignite Tour – Free Exam voucher

As advertised on the Skylines twitter feed, as well a,s many other places during the ignite conference, attendees could take Microsoft certification exams for free. Similar to this, if you have the opportunity to attend an Ignite Tour stop over the 6 months, there is a free exam voucher offer. The voucher will be valid for 180 days from the date of the event.  

The terms and conditions, and further information can be found here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/microsoft-ignite-free-certification-exam-offer

Don’t use Braindumps

This tip didn’t come up in the sessions, but while you search the internet for resources to help with your learning, you may come across sites selling brain dumps. These are collections of questions from the actual exam that someone has memorized and written up afterward. While these sounds useful, there is no way to ensure these questions are correct or accurate, and most importantly if caught you will be unable to get certified as the use of brain dumps are against the terms and conditions of taking a Microsoft exam.

Summary

If you are looking for more course-specific information, there are several sessions from Ignite you can watch on-demand.

AZ 103: https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/80741
AZ 300: https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/80470
AZ 301: https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/78629
AZ 400: https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/80068
AZ 500: https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/79318
AZ 900: https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/78630

—Matt Boyd