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 🙂
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