20 days road map plan for Microsoft Azure Certification

Many professional struggles to clear Microsoft Azure Certification especially in Microsoft Azure cloud-based exams because from January 2019 Microsoft has started launching new Certification exams which are role-based. All these exams are also following a new Certification path which one needs to follow to get a certification badge.

While there are few who want to clear the exam in many illegal ways, I know there are many professionals who actually want to clear it with their knowledge and skills but they don't know how to prepare and from where they can get proper material for that. This article will share a 20 days road map plan which I normally share with my participant after a certification training which I do for my corporate clients.

Just FYI.

Even though I am official MCT on Azure Certifications I am not responsible for any of these content and not giving any guarantee of exam clearance based on the suggestions given here. With all this, I also want to share that as per my past experience above 80% of participants have cleared a specific certification exam after following the same under my guidance.

If you are not sure which Azure Certification is your perfect fit then you can refer my another article here, In this article I am assuming you have decided which certification you want to go for and now looking for steps to follow.

The Road Map

Now if you are ready let's start with step wise (FREE) self learning which you have to do to clear Microsoft azure certification. To understand this properly let's assume we have Mr.Pappu who is a software developer working on dot net core framework from last 2 years and having some basic knowledge about cloud technologies and he has worked on one project which was associated with Microsoft azure cloud so he decided to apply for AZ-204 certification exam.

As he is working professional we are assuming he can spare only 3 hours everyday to prepare for this certification exam. So basically what he is going to do in next 20 days in total 20X3 =60 hours will decide if he is going to be Azure certified or not.

Details of this certification is given in following link:

Day 1 to Day 6 [ total:18 hours]

First step is obviously to know what's there in curriculum of this exam and which kind skills are required to pass this certification. you will get this from the above official link only as there is a separate PDF associated in each exam page. for AZ-204 you can download skills document from here. This will help you to understand which topics are NOT important for this certification exam so that you should not waste your time in those topics. This is really required as Azure is really huge and most people do not clear certification exam in first attempt because they waste their time in topics which are not important for specific exam.

Now coming to the point in this stage of preparation you will exactly follow what Microsoft has shared in the same official link. Which is known as Learning Path. If you check AZ-204 certification link once again and scroll down in same page you will find like this.

As you can see in above image there are two ways to prepare for this exam and the first one which is online and FREE is the learning path. These learning path covers Official Microsoft Hand-On Labs which are related to this certification and you can easily learn things by just doing it step by step.

For these 6 days all I want you to do is just go through these learning path documents and try to understand it. Remember you don't need to do these things practically as it is not required and not suitable for this time duration. So just go though this like a document and learn things by read in it only.

If you are interested in Learning through second option which is Instructor Led Paid training then you can connect to any Microsoft official or you can connect to directly.

Day 7 to Day 11 [ total:15 hours]

Now when you have enough idea about technical topics which are going to be a part of this certification exam it's time to do some practical hands-on which is delicately created for this exam.

There are series of case study based hands-on labs which are created by Microsoft officials which they share on official GitHub learning account of Microsoft Learning.

Root:

https://github.com/MicrosoftLearning/AZ-204-DevelopingSolutionsforMicrosoftAzure

Labs :

https://github.com/MicrosoftLearning/AZ-204-DevelopingSolutionsforMicrosoft-Azure/tree/master/Instructions/Labs

As you can read there mostly Microsoft share these labs and details of the book associated with certification exam only with MCTs but these links are publicly available so that anyone can use it.

These labs are based on Case Study scenarios which are very important part of Microsoft azure certification exams. If you do these exercises which are mentioned in this labs then it will be covering most of the case study based architecture which will be part of the exam case study based questions.

So for these 5 days I want you to do all these labs practically because this will show you real time scenarios to understand it with ease.

Day 17 to Day 20 [ total:12 hours]

It feel so focused when you have worked hard and you are just one step away from your goal. These last four days are dedicated for video learning. Yes you read it correctly, I want you to go though Videos which are related to the topics associated with this exam because now after doing all this when you will go through videos this all conceptual things will start making much more sense to you.

If you ask me which videos you should use. I strongly recommend EDX compared to any other online learning websites and above all you will get all the learning on edx without spending a single penny. I recommend it because the people who teach there are authentic.

Some useful videos on Azure you will find here too.

Azure Videos

After doing all this finally on 21st day Mr.Pappu is surely going to get certified on Azure and for you even after this if you are not feeling confident about this then feel free to connect with me. I will wait for your message here.

In this we have taken example of AZ-204 exam to understand if you are looking for some other certification then find links of yours in following section.

1. AZ 104
2. AZ 204
3. AZ 305
4. DP 203
5. DP-100