How I plan to pass the AWS Certified Developer Associate exam

Strong community commitment meets well-defined methodology

Ifat Koller
8 min readJan 3, 2021

I know what you are thinking. Why not first pass the exam and then write a blog post about “How did I pass the AWS Certified Developer Associate exam?”. Firstly, I think telling a story when it happens, in real-time, is much more interesting and reliable than telling it in retrospective. Also, when I am in the middle of something, I think about it a lot. It occupies my mind. I am interested to hear what others think about it and if they have some tips for me that they would like to share. I know myself — when I will be done with the test, my mind will already be onto the next challenge and I will have no interest in writing this post that hopefully can help others to learn to the exam. Another important reason is that I believe it will make me more committed to the process. By writing this post, it creates some kind of accountability for me which I hope will push me to feel more motivated to study, go to the test center and pass the test.

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Step 1: Find your Motivation

When I started to work at Cloudinary, I had a meeting with my team leader, where we discussed my direction and professional aspirations. I talked about my passion for technology, especially with architecture concepts and I also mentioned that I would like to sharpen my technical skills. He suggested that I start getting more familiar with cloud services especially with AWS as we were working with their services. As there is an AWS certification course that I could work on to help me with my work, the company would sponsor me to study and sit for this exam as a part of my professional training.

Later on, I also worked on some on-call shifts which allowed me to learn how crucial this knowledge is to my work, especially when we had issues in production that I needed to investigate, and to be able to do that, I need to be aware of the bigger picture and understand our product’s full architecture. During these on-call shifts, I am also responsible for our deployment process and I need to monitor our system. As a backend developer, I feel I am missing some understanding in DevOps areas and I thought this could fill in the gaps.

Also, when I interview candidates, I hear about a lot of different product architectures. It is essential that I am knowledgeable about good architecture designs and the different options out there, so I can ask the right questions at an interview. It would help me choose the right candidates who are aware of all the tradeoffs instead of one who is not as well-versed in cloud services.

My company then sent my colleague and myself on a 3-day AWS course held by a reputable tech training company here in Israel to help us get certified. After listening to 8 hours of lecture each day for three days, I left the course feeling overwhelmed by the amount of material I would have to cover if I wanted to pass the test. I knew it would be a challenging feat for me to attempt alone.

Photo by Andrew Neel from Pexels

Step 2: Join (or even better — form) a study group

Studying together can keep us accountable and motivated. If there is a study group you can join, do not hesitate. If you cannot find one, consider forming one!

My colleagues and I manage a program that forms different study groups and helps you work on side projects alongside your regular work with the idea that this will help propel your career forward. As you would typically work on it while managing your career and personal life, the scope of each project is small yet meaningful.

While planning the 5th cycle of the program, we got a message from Shif who said she was starting an online course to help prepare for the AWS Certified Developer Associate exam and wanted to know if anyone would be interested in joining her. She had never done this course before so she was looking for support. We thought this was an amazing opportunity for others in the same boat, so we decided to start a group, and I thought if there was any vacancy, I would like to join in and work on my certification as well.

Step 3: Define a Strategy

In this part, I will be talking about the strategies that my group is using to help us study for the test. While these strategies work for us, if you feel like it does not suit you well, feel free to adapt as much as necessary so you will be able to create your own study routine.

Shif, our study group mentor, came up with a well-defined methodology to help us study for this test. The first thing that we did was to register for Stephane Maarek’s course in Udemy (which takes 29.5 hours) and the plan is for us to self-study on our own during the week. We suppose to invest around 2.5 hours each week learning the course so we can be done with it after 3 months.

We would meet for a short, 30-minute accountability meeting every Tuesday evening to discuss our progress and exchange ideas to help each other.
We would track our progress in a worksheet. What I like about this is being able to see how much other people have done, because it motivates me to keep going so I do not fall too much behind.

Before the meeting, Shif would select 4 questions based on what we are supposed to learn that week. In each meeting, she would ask us these questions before starting a timer for one minute where we have to think about how we would answer these questions. Then, when she gives us the correct answer, we are supposed to compare the answer to how we answered the question during the exercise. The goal is to help us get familiar with the questions for the test and get ready for it. While we study a lot of materials, we do not really have a lot of opportunities to practice answering test questions so this exercise helps us see how much more studying we need to do or if we need to shift our mindset in certain ways to be able to answer the questions correctly.

While this model is supposed to be self-study, some of my group members felt it was difficult for them to stick to the routine on their own. They were finding themselves getting up every 10 minutes while studying so they created a group where they would join a virtual meeting and sit in that meeting to study together. There are no discussions during these meetings but they felt it helped them get up less and focus more on studying because someone is watching them.

Another brilliant idea we wanted to try was that each week a different team member will tell about an AWS service she is working with, in her company and how they use it. I thought it was a great idea as it would help us to learn more about this service. However, once we started the study group, we found this idea would require too much time as we would have to prepare for the presentation and most of us do not have the luxury of time to spend on this activity. Sadly, we had to abandon this idea.

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Current status: Up till now, I have covered 45% percent of the course. Two months have passed since we started. Realistically speaking, I do not think we will finish the course on time as we had initially planned, especially since we had not even gone through past exams and none of us have attempted to sit for the exam. However, I am okay with it and I am sure we will keep going until we will reach our target.

Step 3: Reflect and Re-strategize

At this point, I have spent around 18 hours working on this course. I always view myself as a very organized person who tends to be very rational and logical. I like order and so I thought I would be able to plan my days and study as needed.

However, looking back on my experience for the last 8 weeks, I found that it was very difficult for me to find time to study due to my many responsibilities at work and at home. I have a full-time job, raising two kids and I also play netball twice a week. This does not leave me with a lot of time to study, so I often find myself scrambling to study right before the meeting starts. As the program manager, I do not want to show up to the meeting with no progress at all as I feel it would be a bad example to the other members. That pressures me into studying right before the meeting so I would have something to report to the group.

On the other hand, I also find that I am often motivated to study the day after the meeting because it is all still fresh in my mind. When I think about it, maybe it would have been better for me if we would have set the weekly meeting day to Thursday as I have more time to study on the weekends.

A new strategy I would like to try is to divide the 2.5 hours of study time each week into 5 short study sessions of 30 minutes each and pick 5 days in advance to study for the course.

I am glad that it is a weekly meeting as that gives me enough time to study and not forget about the reason why I signed up for it in the first place. A monthly meeting would mean less commitment from me and it would take me longer to get to my goal of passing this test.

Conclusion

Having followed these strategies for the last 8 weeks, I am glad I was able to complete some of the course with the help of my study group. I am happy that I took this leap of faith and started this course, but I wish I were much ahead in studying for the course. This however has not dimmed my resolve to complete this course. In the next few weeks, I will continue to study and hope to complete this course and sit for the exam in the new year. I will report back when I plan to sit for the AWS exam, so stay tuned!

If you have any tips or tricks on how to pass the AWS exam or how do you find the time to study, please leave a comment below so I can try your tips!

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