I love certification not only Microsoft ones but others as well. But my friends often ask me why I take exam because most of them think certifications are useless. Well, I can understand why they feel in that way, but this is how I use exam to learn more.
As a learning catalog
I don't know everything, of course, thus what I do search or learn are limited to what I know or what I am interested in right now. To broaden my skill and knowledge, I need someone or something tells me which technologies or products are available to learn. That's why I go to MCP exam list to see which exams are available, that gives me options to learn new things.
As a learning guideline
When I decide which service or product to learn, then I need someone tells me where to start.
- Most exam gives me skill measured section, where I can see terminologies or knowledge I should know.
- I can follow the section to learn the service or products one by one.
As a real scenario
After I completed my learning, and hands-on, I yet need real experience and need to know the scenario.
- Each exam gives us around 30-100 questions
- Some exam gives case study base which is great way to test the knowledge
I know that some people say exam questions don't make sense. However, exam quality is actually getting better and better. You can also give feedback if you will.
IT pro exams?
I am a developer, yet I take IT Pro exams. Why?
- Because I can learn the things from the other direction. For example, I can learn design pattern of the service or product by knowing what features the product has.
- I can see what challenge IT pro guys have so that I can work better with them. And now DevOps time, so I need to know IT pro things anyway :)
Okay, that's it. Because I learn new things to improve myself, I never study to pass the exam, thus I often fail. Which is actually good as I have another chance to learn deeper :)
Resources
Followings are resources I usually use.
Microsoft Virtual Academy (Free)
Channel 9 (Free)
Pluralsight (Not Free)
Hope you share how you learn new things as well!
Ken
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