As countries head into lockdown/quarantine/#StayHomeSaveLives, we find ourselves with a fair bit of free time on our hands. While I’m sure Netflix, Disney Plus, and Amazon Prime will be getting a thorough workout during this time, it’s also a great opportunity to upskill and maybe gain a couple of those certifications you’ve been meaning to get for the past few years now. Even if your aim isn’t to actually sit an exam, there’s no harm in using all this time to actually upskill and hit the ground running when this is all over.
So here’s a select few courses that I’ve personally done and can recommend. Some are programming, some are devops, some are Scrum (ugh, I know but.. hear me out). A few have some free study options but even if there is a cost, typically it’s only going to be ~$10 or so. And even if you don’t use my recommended course, often there are free alternatives out there. So let’s jump right in!
Azure Exam AZ-204 – Developing Solutions For Microsoft Azure
So let’s start off with one that I’m sure many readers will think about doing in their career. The Microsoft exam AZ-204 is made for developers to expand their knowledge on everything Azure. AZ-204 used to be called AZ-203, and before that was 70-532, but they are all roughly the same thing. The only difference is that as Azure keep adding new services and features, the exam has to keep getting updated. Because the exam outline is released once (When the exam is released), they can’t just keep adding into the same exam and have to update the number. Regardless, AZ-204, AZ-203 and 70-532 are all on developers getting to grips with Azure services.
Who Is This For?
If you are a developer and use Azure for work, sit this exam. It’s that simple. I would even go as far to say that even if you are a tester/QA, or someone that is an “almost” developer (Like DevOps, report writer, SQL developer etc), you should sit this exam. If you aren’t someone who likes exams, following the study materials is still an amazing way to learn the ins and outs of a tonne of Azure services. I can’t even begin to describe the amount of times I’ve been asked a question at work and thought “huh… I have the exact answer just from flicking through that Azure book for the past few weeks”.
Exam Cost
The exam itself is around $165USD and as of right now, you can sit the exam from your home. You do not need to go into a testing center to complete. So you can actually complete all studying and sit the exam during the lockdown!
Check out the exam here : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/learn/certifications/exams/az-204
Study Materials
There are a multitude of ways to study for this exam, so I’ll give a quick rundown of them all.
If you like studying from books, there are Microsoft Exam Ref books available on Amazon. Unfortunately a book for AZ-204 hasn’t been released so you would have to use the AZ-203 reference book (Kindle/Paperback on Amazon here). I personally bought the Exam Ref 70-532 book, and thought it was a bit of a mixed bag. There was typos and references to non existent diagrams all over the place, but it was still a pretty solid book. The bonus of the Exam Ref book is that it gives you a bit of an intro to a topic in a structured way, and then I always just went and read more on the official Azure documentation.
If you prefer online video courses, then for pretty much all Azure exams, people use the series from Scott Duffy which are available on Udemy. I’ve personally used Scott Duffy’s stuff for both the developer and architecture exams and found them pretty much spot on. For the cost ($~14), it’s kinda a no brainer. The other thing I’ll mention is that I bought the course when the exam was still 70-532 and I still have access to the AZ-203. Scott gives all existing students access to the updated exams. So even if you buy the AZ-203 course, when that gets rolled into AZ-204, you will get access to that as well. I mean that’s not a guarantee but so far, I purchased the course in February of 2017 and I still have access right now. It’s crazy good value.
Finally, Microsoft have free learning resources available that are typically a mix of articles/videos available at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/learn/browse/ and https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Microsoft-Azure-Tutorials. These are great free resources but I’ve never really found them to be that aligned to the exam. In some ways that’s a good thing since you aren’t learning specifically what’s in the exam and instead just working your way through Azure resources. But if you intend on sitting the exam, I recommend trying to stick with an Exam Ref course/book so that you know exactly what it is you should be learning.
Professional Scrum Master (PSM) – Scrum.org
Professional Scrum Master is the certification available from scrum.org. There is another certification in the scrum world called “Certified Scrum Master” that you will probably see scrum masters tack onto the end of their email signatures like it’s some sort of PHD, but they are testing the exam same thing. PSM is just an online exam for when you think you know the material. CSM is a course you have to do in person and pay a few grand for the badge of honor. In the grand scheme of things, knowing scrum is highly advantageous to the programming world right now, irrespective of the letters you want to put in your LinkedIn name.
Who Is This For?
I actually recommend sitting the PSM exam for anyone who works in a team (or even near a team) that works in any agile methodology. You don’t have to be angling for a scrum masters job to sit this exam, it really is for anyone looking to gain broader knowledge on exactly how scrum works. I found it extremely helpful in understanding the “why” of Scrum. “Why” do we even bother with a sprint retrospective? If someone is away, why should we even bother doing a standup that day?
Another reason I found this exam helpful was that you only learn exactly what the scrum guide actually says. The scrum guide itself is 15 odd pages of info and that’s it. It seems like every workplace has their own “additions” to Scrum or their own ScrumButs, so it’s good to separate out workplace frameworks versus what the scrum guide actually says.
Exam Cost
The exam is $150 and is purely an online exam. You can purchase it and sit it whenever you want from the comfort of your own home.
Study Materials
The incredible thing about learning scrum is you can download the scrum guide here, read it 3 times over, and sit the exam and pass. I personally think that if you have *never* used Scrum before it’s actually easier to sit the exam and pass because you only know what the guide told you. I’ve seen colleagues actually fail the exam because they think “here’s how we solve this problem at my work” rather than “the scrum guide says”.
I also used an online video course on Udemy called “Scrum Certification Prep”. While there is hours of lectures, I kinda felt like they were all over the place. When I did it, there were two different instructors with one being really hard to hear. It also seemed like a lot of the content was repetitive which… Is kinda unique to scrum in a way. Again, the scrum guide is so short and concise but people have made careers on running workshops for Scrum, and the only way to do that is to repeat the same things over and over.
AWS Cerified Solutions Architect Associate
While I recommended the developer exam for Azure, I actually recommend the architecture exam when it comes to AWS. I found the AWS Architecture Associate exam to be more of an AWS 101 rather than getting down to the nitty gritty. Personally, most of my work ends up on Azure just because of the synergy between the .NET ecosystem and things like Azure Web Apps. But I always want to keep up to date with what’s happening on AWS so that if we run into a road block in Azure, there’s always the “let’s check out what AWS offers”. Even if you never work with AWS, I think it’s helpful to know what else is out there at a high level – and the AWS Architecture Associate exam gives that.
Who Is This For?
If you’re working on AWS day to day I think that this exam is a no brainer from developers, to testers, to architects. If you are working mostly on Azure, then I think this exam/study is still beneficial but mostly if you are in a tech lead/architect sort of role where you always want to have a comparison of “this is what the other cloud offers”.
Exam Cost
All associate exams at AWS are $150USD each. Again AWS offers online exams so you can sit the exam from the comfort of your own home even during lockdown.
Study Materials
I’ve spoken to numerous people who have sat AWS exams and they all say one thing. “We used A Cloud Guru”. To give you an idea of how popular A Cloud Guru’s study material is, there are currently 520k students enrolled on the Udemy course here. That’s insane. Again, I purchased this course in November of 2016, and I still have access to the updates materials which is just crazy value for money.
A Cloud Guru also offer practice tests with over 200 questions for around $20 as well which is crazy value for money. I highly recommend if you are looking to sit the exam, to do the practice questions as they may hit on some topics that you don’t actually know that well, giving you the opportunity to go and study that area a bit more.
