3 out of 12 - Azure Administrator Associate

Quest update: 3 out of 12 done! Today I passed the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate exam with a score of 781/1000.
For 23 days of studying, that’s quite alright.

How I prepared for this exam

So as I said, my plan was to go though all the relevant topics on Microsoft Learn. And I did manage to go through at least most of them.
But I also found out that binging through learn modules is a bit of a rabbit hole. You start on a relevant module, and then when you finish it, it says “You’ve earned an achievement” which is addictive. But up in the right corner, it says: Next Module.
And when you click that one, it’s not always one that is relevant to what you might need to know for the exam.
It’s like when you’re on wikipedia late at night looking up something about a movie you just watched, and then you end up reading about the history of the Roman Empire, or learning about which country in the world has the only flag that isn’t rectangular.
I sat up far too long some nights where I went down the next module rabbit hole and read about HCP and Azure Batch, which was very interesting, but not extremely relevant to the exam I was preparing for.

I also used the free practice assessment for what it was worth.

I’m also lucky enough to be able to discuss a lot of the topics with my colleagues at work, and with my wife, who works in a field adjacent to mine. So that helps a lot.

My thoughts about the exam

This was the first time I’ve done a certification exam with an “open book” policy.
For this exam I actually had the whole learn.microsoft.com available in a split screen, by just pressing a button.
Did this make the exam easier? No.
The questions were still the type where you have to read them carefully and think about what they’re asking.
There were quite a few trap questions where if you didn’t know the intricacies of a PowerShell command, you could easily pick the wrong answer. But I do think that you can use it to quite an advantage if you know how to search for the right information.
I used it to look up specifics in the learn documentation for a few questions, which I think helped me get a few right answers. But I also think I probably wasted a bit of time by searching in the wrong way.
So if you’re planning on taking this exam, I would recommend that you practice searching for lots of different information in the learn documentation, so you know how to do it when you need it.
And manage your time well. I had 100 minutes to answer 51 questions. I used 95 minutes in total.
When I thought I was done, I got to the case study with only 13 minutes left. Luckily, the case study keeps the same texts for all the questions, so I really only had to read it once and then answer the related questions, so it went pretty fast.

What’s next?

I haven’t decided yet. But I’ll have to decide soon enough, since I need to start studying for the next one to keep my schedule.