Master your AWS Certification: Insider Tips from a Veteran Instructor
For over ten years, I’ve taught organizations and small teams how to get the most out of the AWS platform. Outside of technical questions, the most common inquiry is how to best prepare for an upcoming AWS Certification exam.
I’ll share my strategies for preparing for AWS exams in this article. Let’s get started!
Hands-on Experience
I can’t understate the importance of hands-on experience. If you’ve ever taken one of my AWS classes, you’ll know the analogy I like to use; learning AWS is like learning a language. To truly understand it, you have to use it daily. I took French classes throughout high school, but when I graduated I couldn’t carry on even a simple conversation in French. Ironically, I ended up at a university in Ottawa. I learnt more French in my first six months living in Ottawa than in my high school career. That’s because I used the skill daily.
AWS is exactly the same. With a platform as large and dynamic as AWS, the only way to learn about it is to use it. I’d suggest coming up with a few projects you can work on. One of my favourites is to build a public-facing website. I like this project because first, it’s practical, and you’ll likely run into it in the real world, plus it hits on many of the topics you’ll most likely run into in an exam scenario - compute, database, networking, and storage.
Reading
Of all the exam tips I provide to students, reading is by far the most disliked. Let’s be honest, reading is not as fun as building, and reading FAQ pages and product documentation can put even the most dedicated learner to sleep - quickly. Unfortunately, reading is just as important as the hands-on experience I mentioned earlier. The challenge with reading is knowing what to read. AWS doesn’t provide much guidance here. I’d suggest that you review the appropriate exam guide to see if AWS provides any hints on whitepapers or FAQs to review. Depending on the exam your mileage will vary here, but investing the time in a quick review may help you in the long run.
Here’s how I tackle the challenge of deciding what to read. I review the AWS exam guide and note every AWS service mentioned in the domain sections of the guide. This shouldn’t take long, and when you’re finished, you’ll have a decent reading list. Read the FAQ page(s) at least once for every service you wrote down. In addition to reading the FAQs, I’d strongly suggest you start digging through the AWS documentation for the services on your reading list.
Reading is by far the most challenging exam prep phase, but I can tell you from experience that there have been multiple occasions when I’m writing an exam that I’ve been able to relate a question or customer scenario back to something I read - either in a FAQ, product documentation or even a whitepaper.
YouTube Videos
Consuming YouTube content - specifically Re: Invent session recordings - is my ‘secret’ pro tip. There have been numerous times where I’ve learnt something new from a Re: Invent session and then been asked about it during an exam.
The challenge with watching videos is the same as the previous tip on reading. How do you know what to watch? Here’s how I tackle it. Use the reading list you created earlier as your guide - and then find videos related to those AWS services from previous Re: Invent conferences.
The problem will be the amount of content to get through. Here’s how I tackle that. First, I simply don’t watch really old content. If I’m writing the exam in the next six months, I won’t watch content from before 2022 - unless I can’t find anything newer. Next, depending on how quickly the presenter talks, I’ll speed up the video to 1.25 and maybe even 1.50 times. I don’t watch the video; instead, I listen to what they say and try to identify gaps in my knowledge. Here’s a real example:
Way back in 2015, I passed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification. I used the same tips I’m providing here to help prep for the exam. I was listening to a Re: Invent session when the speaker mentioned EC2 Autoscaling lifecycle hooks. I had no clue what they were talking about, so I wrote it down - but I didn’t stop the session recording. I continued making notes for anything else they mentioned during the session where I had a gap in my knowledge. Afterwards, I filled in those knowledge gaps by reading FAQs and product documentation.
When I took the exam, I just happened to get a question where EC2 Autoscaling lifecycle hooks were mentioned, and I was able to handle that question because I had watched the video.
I’ve used this strategy ever since and it’s never let me down.
One more tip on watching Re: Invent content: If you find a video that happens to have a vendor presenting, skip it. No offence to vendor sessions; I have attended quite a few, and they are great. However, in this particular case, we want information about AWS products and services, not how a vendor is embracing a ‘DevOps culture’ and using AWS. Save those videos for another time.
So there you have it. This is how I prepare for every AWS exam I take.