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Tasha Penwell
Tasha Penwell

Posted on

Tips on Passing AWS Exam the First Time!

I had a couple of people ask me on tips to passing the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Practitioner exam so I made a little video on resources I used and tips I learned.

Resources like...
☁️ A Cloud Guru
☁️ AWS Whitepapers
☁️ AWS Certification courses

Tips like...
🤓 Write down (not type) your notes
🤓 Make your own flash cards
🤓 Read those Whitepapers!
🤓 Do those quizzes daily

There’s a new resource I learned about a week before my exam called ExamPro with Andrew Brown but didn’t get a chance to check it out before this past exam. I will when prepping for next one though!

I also have a couple of upcoming presentations discussing...

👩‍💻 Cloud Computing for Small Businesses (how can use the AWS Cloud)

👩‍💻 Looking Up Into the AWS Cloud (how can teach about the AWS Cloud)

Top comments (4)

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andrewbrown profile image
Andrew Brown 🇨🇦

💯 Excellent Tips Tasha.

Learn all the services

For CCP its good to learn as many services as possible. You don't need to know how to use them just know what they do as they can help eliminate the wrong choices. One of the recommended whitepapers is a glorified list of AWS services.

Unscored Questions

If you take your exam and you see questions on obscure services you didn't study for don't stress. AWS is always testing new questions which are not scored. So you can see 5 questions which you'll have no knowledge of and its likely these unscored questions.

Watch out for these

Business-centric services are starting to appear more such as QuickSight, Macie, Gaurd Duty, WAF, Amazon Connect so give them a learn. Every exam is different so if your friends had a wildly different experience this is not uncommon. Sometimes you'll be lucky and get lots of question you know and sometimes you'll be unlucky.

Study Material vs Exam

No matter what study provider you use, everyone in the market including ExamPro is a bit unaligned with the content since AWS shifted their exams questions from being factoidal to highly situational. Probably 6-9 months all the study content providers will adjust their content to be more in line.

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tashapenwellhc profile image
Tasha Penwell

Thanks! One of the things I noticed with the exam was terminology for services that I never heard of. I don’t know if it was a trick answer or something I missed from not reading as much of white papers as I should have. I will definitely be spending more time on WP for next exam.

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wyatt profile image
Wyatt Lee Chastain

I would also say that if you have a higher certification (i.e. Associate SA or Developer), you're probably okay on passing the Cloud Practitioner, but take a closer look at billing and account management, which never comes up in any of the other exams.

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tashapenwellhc profile image
Tasha Penwell

Interesting...I never thought about anyone going from Associate Level to the Practitioner Level. Do you think someone who’s interested in learning more about marketing reasons to adopt AWS would take the CP exam for certification? Great comment!