How Do I Prepare For AWS Associate Certification

In the following, we’ll be discussing a crucial topic that’s “How do I prepare for AWS associate certification?” and will discuss it thoroughly within the article. Here are some tips for anyone looking for advice about preparing for and taking an AWS associate certification exam:

Book The Exam, But Give Yourself Enough Time

Usually, when people first set out to get an AWS certification, they have a few false starts. Usually, people are good for about a week, putting in an hour or two of study every night, but then they’d allow something to interrupt their routine. You need to set a hard deadline for yourself, and so you should actually book the exam. This definitely will make you get in gear. You may be a bit stressed in the days leading up to the exam, but that will not put the pressure of a deadline on you.

Find A Study Buddy

Getting AWS certified is incredibly much encouraged by our leadership. You can partner up to study on occasion, with a few other people who are also preparing for certification, which will provide you much, more motivation. Also, we found that a little healthy, as well as jovial competitiveness, will push you to do our best.

Learn The Theory And Do The Labs

AWS provides plenty of certification prep as well as training opportunities. You may find it tempting to power through all the theory material and come back to the labs later, but according to us, it will be more effective to do the labs instantly after learning the relative theory. While the exams don’t have any labs, using the labs to get firsthand experience applying the theory will improve your mental model and make it easier to recall the material.

Don’t Expect To See The Same Questions You Studied In The Actual Exam

During your exam prep, you may have answered hundreds of sample questions. And while the themes and required knowledge were similar, never once will you see a practice question on the actual exam. In this respect, you should not learn by rote—practicing the same questions over and over again— as they will really benefit a candidate. With that being said, the sample questions are vital to your study because when you got one wrong, you can go back to the prep material to understand why you were wrong, and thus improved my knowledge.

Don’t Hit Submit Until You’re Sure

When actually taking the examination, once you click Submit on a question, the answer zips off to the server and you can’t change it. You can skip around through questions and, as long as you don’t submit them, come back to answer them when you’re ready. If you choose an option for a question, though, you can’t skip to another question until you’ve cleared that option.

Skip Around If You Need To

You can skip the questions you are not sure about and submit questions where you are sure of the answer. Coming back to more difficult questions after you have answered some you are sure about will give you much more confidence—it’s a strategy that we always recommend.

Think About The Options

Have some patience and make sure you’re reading the question AND choices closely. The format for the Solutions Architect—Associate exam is multiple choice and you will encounter several tricky questions in which the answer options will all be very similar. In such cases, you need to read the question closely, picked up on keywords, and try to eliminate the options you feel probably weren’t the answer.

What Happens After You Finish The Exam

In the end, you will have about 10 minutes to spare once you put the final touches on the exam, so you would have pretty much used the full 80 minutes. You’ll find out immediately if you passed or not. (Passing scores could vary from examination to examination.) AWS will also send you an email that details how you did in the various areas of the exam.

Useful AWS Exam Prep Resources

Here are some of the resources you can use in your prep:

AWS Certified Solutions Official Study Guide: Associate Exam

You can read this book front to back, and work through the questions at the end of each chapter. The book comes with online quizzes and practice tests that are very useful. It is a book though, so it can quickly fall out of date. You should be careful to choose the latest edition.

Linux Academy

Along with covering all things AWS—from security to storage to application services—this course picked up on some subjects the book lacked, like the API Gateway, AWS Lambda, VPC Flow Logs, and application load balancers. We offer several very useful videos as well.

Whizlabs

This course provided plenty of full-length mock exams as well as practice quizzes.

A Cloud Guru

This was another smart, comprehensive tour through AWS, with several videos ranging from 5-20 minutes in length.

Now It’s Your Turn

If you’re preparing to take an AWS certification examination, or just want to learn more about what the exams cover, including costs and formats, check out our post, AWS Cloud Certifications Explained: which Certification is correct for You? Remember, you’re not getting certified for the sake of getting the certification; you’re doing it to become a bona fide cloud architect!

How Do I Prepare For AWS Associate Certification