Why it is worth passing HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate

In this article, I will briefly describe certification and the process and explain the advantages of passing it.

Firstly, let’s talk about the exam process. In my case, I registered for the exam and took two weeks to prepare because I had worked with Terraform before. After reading the exam details, I understood it would be enough. Then, I started preparation and spent approximately one hour per working day preparing for the exam, reading the preparation guide, and creating a small pet project where I tested unfamiliar features.

In my opinion, you don’t need to buy courses for this exam. It’s pretty straightforward and almost missing tricky questions where you should understand how it works under the hood. It’s better to have practice on small pet project to remember all the necessary information from the preparation guide.

On an exam day, you must follow the proctor’s instructions about preparing for the workplace. They are strict, and my recommendation is to remove everything from the table, close doors and windows, and remove the watch and other jewelry, not to spend time discussing it with the proctor. And, of course, don’t forget to prepare your ID.

You can ask me why passing this certification came to my mind. I’ve already passed a few IT certifications and can say it’s helpful for a few reasons:

• When preparing, you will read about corner cases or things you are not using frequently and understand the whole system
  You will recall many Terraform features, methods, and approaches that you can apply to your projects;

• When you try to bring Terraform into a new project or move existing infrastructure to IaC, a certificate will be a source of truth you have experience with this;

• It will help in the interview, mainly if the company uses Terraform as an IaC solution. Also, the interviewer will most likely skip simple questions, and we will talk about deeper topics in Terraform or IaC in general. It will help you sell your skills better;

Summarizing the above, I think it’s a good investment for your future. It costs about 70$ but gives you many more opportunities.

Also, here, I will leave sources where you can prepare for the certification:

• Terraform exam page;

• Preparation guide;