I passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam after studying for 2 weeks, with no prior experience. Here's how, and why.
Why?
Several months ago, my manager asked me to work on getting cloud certifications. I fully intended to do so, but because my team doesn't use AWS directly and because I had more interesting projects to work on (not to mention my full-time workload), I lacked the motivation to do it.
I thought, "I'll just finish what I'm working on now and get back to the AWS stuff before my yearly evaluation. I have plenty of time."
Turns out, I didn't.
On January 3rd, I received a notification that self-evaluations had opened and were due on January 24th, 3 weeks later.
At that point, I had worked on an AWS course for about 3 hours. That's 10% of the course. I quickly realized that I was not going to finish the course in time.
I had to either accept the fact that I would disappoint my manager and receive a worse evaluation than I could have, or figure out how to get certified in less than 3 weeks.
How?
I started by continuing the AWS course (Ultimate AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02; highly recommend it), until I realized that I spend about the same amount of time on things like taking notes and the hands-on exercises as I do on watching the course videos. That means that 15 hour course would end up taking 30 hours. I didn't have time to finish the course, let alone to prepare for and take the exam.
Cheat Sheets
I needed something to teach me just enough about every topic in the exam, without diving too deep. So I looked for cheat sheets, and found this one. I wasn't expecting to find what I needed immediately or all in one place, but this ended up being exactly that. I was able to read through it in one sitting, and I learned a lot.
I read through that cheat sheet several times, sometimes reading the sections in reverse order to avoid primacy bias, and Googling anything I felt like I needed more information on.
I also skimmed through the exam guide and the short descriptions in the Services dropdown menu on the AWS Console.
After doing this for a few days, I felt ready to start taking some practice tests.
Practice Tests
First, I took the free 20-question AWS Skillbuilder test. I failed, but that was to be expected.
Then I took the more realistic practice test at the end of the AWS course. I also failed that one, but not by much (63% out of 70% for passing). I was getting better.
The instructor for the AWS course also has a separate course with 6 additional practice tests. Since my company pays for Udemy subscriptions, I made sure to take advantage of this. I took the first test... and passed!
I took the second and third tests and passed those as well. I also went back and took the free test again, and passed it too.
Throughout this whole process, I made sure to read the explanations for the questions I got wrong, and even some that I got right (anything I was unsure about), and to reread the cheat sheet as needed.
I would've liked to take the rest of the tests I had access to, but I was running out of time and now that I was consistently passing the practice tests, I felt confident enough to take the real one.
Exam Time
I scheduled the exam for January 17th, 1 week before my self-imposed deadline, and 2 weeks after I started studying (I wanted to leave a gap in case it took a while to get the score report). On the day of the exam, I read the cheat sheet one more time, and then I gave it my best shot. I passed with a score of 881!
Just because you can pass the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam after studying for 2 weeks, doesn't mean you should (you probably shouldn't). Many things could have gone wrong, and at many points, I thought I wouldn't be able to do it.
This is also an entry-level exam; I would definitely advise against following this process on more advanced exams. And AWS is a very good thing to be knowledgeable in as a web developer; it deserves to be learned "properly".
That being said, I'm proud of what I was able to do, and I thought I'd share my experience in case it can help anyone else in their learning journey. Thanks for reading!
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