Passing the AZ-102 exam

s I'm sure you are aware Microsoft have changed their certification paths for Azure, the main announcements came at MS Ignite in September 2018. A lot of the exams they announced have been in beta and over the Christmas holiday most of the exams were made live. A lot of changes and even a new exam was announced. If you haven't heard about the new certifications Scott Duffy (b|t) has made an excellent video explaining it all:

My Journey

For those that follow my blog you will know that I have set myself some exam targets (one of which the work have said I need to pass) and the first one I ticked off the list in 2019 was the AZ-900 one. I then ticked off AZ-302 a few days later and I've now ticked off the AZ-102 exam!

• AZ-900
• AZ-102
• AZ-302

Studying for AZ-102

The AZ-10X exams have been out of beta for a while so there is quite a lot of study material, and practice questions out there for all three of the exams. So studying for this one was slightly easier than the other two as the study material and practice test for those are still in development.

I have access to MeasureUp practice tests through my employers so I took advantage of that and spent time going through the AZ-100 and AZ-101 practice questions. As AZ-102 is a combination of these two certifications it made sense for me to work through these practice questions to get a well rounded view of where my strength and weaknesses lay.

For me that was a really good exercise and I quickly identified the areas I was confident in and the areas were I had some studying to do. Armed with that information I headed to to the Azure Documentation and did some reading. After some hard work studying I went back to the practice questions I noticed a difference in my scoring, I was improving on the areas I was weak in.

I repeated that cycle again and went and sat the exam and passed!

My knowledge of Azure is fairly solid after using it for about 2 years as my day to day job so I just had to fill in some bits and pieces of knowledge, plus I had good luck with the exam question pool drawing out ones that suits my skill set.

Whatever exam or certification path you are targeting this year my advice would be to go spend some time with the Azure Documentation, or deploying and using the services within Azure or utilise the Microsoft Learn material. Doing one or all three of these things will help you achieve your targets.

Go out there, Never Stop Learning and validate your skills!