Welcome to Shawsers Tech Certification Journey!

Hi everyone, below I would like to share my experience starting in 2020 with writing IT exams again after many years.

First some of my social info and how you can contact me:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawsers/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/jasonbshaw
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawsers/

My certification journey:
May 11, 2020 - This was the start of my journey into writing exams again. It has been many years since I studied for and actually wrote the exam. The motivation for me was partially that I had a free exam voucher, but I also wanted to show and experience in Azure by actually getting certified. I took the time, studied more than I needed to and passed the Azure Fundamentals exam with over 90%!

December 18, 2020 - I thought I would have wrote this exam much sooner than I did, as I was studied up in July, but felt I wasn’t properly prepared and decided to wait until after the summer. Sure enough summer went and into late fall I decided to start studying again and along came the “Get AWS Certified Global Challege” as part of AWS re:Invent so I decided to take part in that challenge and ended up passing the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam just before the Christmas break! It was a nice way to end the year for me, getting two entry level Cloud certs.

January 15, 2021 - I jumped right back into studying after the Christmas break and decided to focus on Azure, starting with the Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104). I remembered that I had 3 exam vouchers from all of the online/virtual conferences I attended over the past year during covid, I figured why not give it my best shot, go head down studying for 2 solid weeks. This meant getting up at 5am everyday, watching training videos for 2 hours, working until noon, study again for 1 hour during lunch, work until 5pm, then right back into studying for another 2 - 4 hours each night watching videos and doing labs. I have been using Azure for many years at this point, so I wasn’t learning from scratch by any means, but I wanted to make sure I was well prepared for the exam as I knew this was was much longer and a lot more technical in detail. I went into the exam feeling very well prepared and passed the exam and was a great way to start the year, becoming an Azure Administrator Associate!

February 1, 2021 - So I decided to keep the studying train going since it worked so well and attempt the Azure Architect Technologies (AZ-303) exam. I continued to get up early to study, during my lunch break and every evening. What I found was that there is a lot of overlap in content between the AZ-104 and AZ-303 exams, so the studying wasn’t as intense as I thought it was going to be and I am glad I went right into studying for AZ-303. I still went heads down for 2 solid weeks and again I had a free exam voucher and felt I had nothing to loose. But looking at the exam guide and how long the exam was I felt a little bit stressed going into the exam as I have never sat for an exam that long. All in all it took me over 2 hours to take the exam, as I took my time before moving on to the next question. In the end it worked for me and I was super excited to find out that I passed the Azure Architect Technologies exam!

February 22, 2021 - Now that I was really on a role and passed two exams in one month, I figured I had nothing to loose to at least try to pass AZ-304 to become an Azure Certified Solution Architect Expert, especially that I had one exam voucher left. So I started studying but not as extreme as the last two exams and figured I would give my self a solid three weeks of studying instead of two. Studying for AZ-304 again had some overlap from both AZ-104 and AZ-303, so it made it a little easier to study overall but had to dig into a few areas that were not covered in the other two exams and also from a design perspective. This exam was the most stressed I have been sitting for an exam, knowing it was the last chance I had with my voucher but also knowing how far I have come and the amount of studying I had put in, the time away from family to study but how much support they have given me over the past few months. But I was happy to find out in the end after almost the full 3 hours in the exam I PASSED!! I have never been so excited and happy with passing an exam!! Passing the AZ-304 Azure Architect Design exam in combination with the AZ-303 above I am now officially a Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert!!. This is one certification I thought I would never have, but am so excited and happy about getting it and now able to share this with everyone and to actually use what I learned in my career! Now time to relax and take a much needed break from studying for a while…

April 8, 2021 - I decided to finally take the Scrum Fundamentals exam, as I have studied for it many years ago but never wrote the free exam. It took only a few days of studying, and wasn’t that hard overall. It was a nice way to get back into studying after a few months off after writing my last Azure exam. I am now Scrum Fundamentals Certified!

May 6, 2021 - A day after I heard that the company I work for: Turbonomic had been acquired by IBM, I decided to look into and start learning about some of the IBM certifications available. What I found is that IBM has a lot of free courses and certifications available here: https://cognitiveclass.ai, so I decided to test my knowledge in Kubernetes and how this works in IBM Cloud specifically. I started with and passed the first course and exam for Containers and Kubernetes Essentials. Next I took the course Getting started with Microservices with Istio and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and passed that course and exam as well. Now the last course in the series was Beyond the Basics: Istio and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and again which completed and passed the exam. With all three courses completed and exams passed I earned the certification Containers, K8s and Istio on IBM Cloud, becoming the first person in Turbonomic with an IBM Cloud certification! Overall the courses were not too difficult as the bulk of what I had to learn about was specific to IBM Cloud and Istio, my existing knowledge of Kubernetes and Docker really helped with passing the exams in each of these.

June 9, 2021 - I decided to attempt the Gremlin Certified Chaos Engineering Practitioner exam as I was looking on LinkedIn and found that Gremlin was offering this new exam for free for a limited time. I learned about Gremlin and their Chaos Engineering from one of the virtual conferences I attended and really liked the concept and wanted to learn more. I studied for a few days and attempted the exam and sure enough I was able to pass the exam to earn this certification!. Pretty cool as now I am a certified Gremlin and I got the shirt to prove it!!

March 18, 2022 - After a long break from studying for exams, I decided to start studying again before our family vacation in March. I knew if I waited until after the vacation I would kind of have to start over with studying. So I forged ahead and studyed every night during the week and every weekend leading up to the vacation. I was originally planning on studying for and writing the Google Cloud Digital Leader exam, but a co-worker of mine pushed me to write the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer exam instead. I was initially unsure, but after some time looking into it and with my many years of past cloud experience and AWS and Azure exams that I passed I decided to do it. Which meant taking a few more in depth courses on Udemy, but I found that it wasn’t too bad going deeper and the concept were very similar to that of AWS and Azure and was really learning more about specific Google Cloud services and mentally matching them to the similar AWS and Azure services to make studying easier. I registered for the exam on Wedesday, March 9 at 6PM, I was nervous but felt ready to write the exam. After almost a full 2 hours I completed the exam making sure the toake extra time to review my answers, I felt pretty good about how the exam went. After submitting my results…..I PASSED!! This was awesome, as I was leaving for vacation the next day and was a great way to start the trip!! Officially it took about a week for Google to review my exam and results and receive my certification on Marh 18 during my trip, view my certification here!, I was on high the entire trip knowing that I had passed and have another cloud certification!!

Next up is focusing on Kubernetes with some free/cheap courses to start:

Certified Calico Operator
Rancher Operator: Level 1

My long term plan is the following paid courses and exams (in no particular order), after the two above…

AWS Solution Architect Associate
RedHat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration
Terraform Associate Certification