My Experience Learning and Passing the GH-900 (GitHub Foundations): What Helped, What Didn't, and What I'd Do Differently

Sourav Shrestha — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 16:30:18 +0000

If you use GitHub every day but have never gone through it top to bottom, the GH-900 (GitHub Foundations) certification is a surprisingly good excuse to fill in the gaps.

I passed it recently with a score of 790, after about a week of prep, and I wanted to write down what actually helped versus what I'd skip if I did it again.

My Background Going In

I use GitHub in my day-to-day work: commits, branches, pull requests, the usual. But going into this exam, I quickly realized using GitHub daily and knowing GitHub as a platform are two different things.

There's a whole layer of features, subscription tiers, and enterprise-level settings that most individual contributors never touch, and that's exactly where this exam likes to poke.

How Long I Studied?

About one week, studying in the evenings. It's a genuinely doable timeline if you already have hands-on GitHub experience, but I'd stretch it out more if I were starting from scratch (more on that below).

What Helped?

The official GitHub Foundations YouTube playlist
This was my main resource: GitHub Foundations playlist. It's structured, free, and maps closely to the exam objectives. I watched through it and took notes on anything I didn't already know cold — things like GitHub Projects, Codespaces details, and security features I don't touch in my regular workflow.
Official Microsoft practice assessments
The official practice assessment was useful for getting a feel for question style, but be warned, it does not match the real exam's difficulty (again, more on that below).
Revising in my head + repeated practice tests
Rather than re-watching hours of video, I found it more effective to mentally review topics (subscription tiers, feature availability per plan, security/compliance features) and just keep re-running practice tests until the weak spots stopped being weak spots.

What Didn't Help?

Long, paid Udemy-style courses. For a Foundations level exam like this, the long-form paid courses are overkill. They're built for depth, and this exam mostly rewards breadth, knowing that a feature exists and which tier it's on, rather than deep hands-on mastery. Save the money and the hours.

The Exam Itself

75 questions, mostly multiple choice.

It was noticeably harder than the official practice assessment, a good chunk of questions touched on things that weren't explicitly called out in the course material.

The heaviest ask was around source control workflows, GitHub Projects, and subscription/plan differences, including Enterprise level features. If you don't normally touch GitHub Enterprise, budget extra time here.

Overall difficulty: easy, but not too easy.
It respects your time, don't walk in assuming daily GitHub use alone will carry you through.

What I'd Do Differently?

If I started over, I'd spend more deliberate time specifically on:

GitHub subscription/plan comparisons (Free vs. Team vs. Enterprise), this came up more than I expected.

Enterprise-level admin and security features, even if I'll never use them day-to-day, since the exam treats them as core knowledge.

My Advice If You're Taking GH-900

If you already use GitHub regularly, one focused week is enough, but don't coast on that experience alone.
Watch the official YouTube playlist fully, even the parts that feel basic.
Use the official practice test, but treat your score there as a floor, not a ceiling, the real exam pushes harder, especially on plans/tiers and Enterprise features.
Skip the long paid courses unless you genuinely want deep GitHub mastery beyond what this cert requires.
Pay specific attention to GitHub Projects and subscription-level feature differences, that's where I saw the biggest gap between what I use and what the exam asks.

Overall, GH-900 was a solid, low-stress way to formalize knowledge I'd been picking up haphazardly on the job. If you're comfortable with Git and GitHub already, it's a very achievable one-week goal.

Good luck if you're taking it next! 🚀

Here is my certificate 🙂

DEV Community: Sourav Shrestha