Having struggled to find time to write this blog recently due to preparing for an exam (the AZ-140 Azure Virtual Desktop exam if anyone is interested) I thought it might be good to share my experience of using the online learning journeys provided by Microsoft as an alternative to the paid for, instructor led courses. This is by no means the only way to learn the material, but an account of my experience that resulted in a successful accreditation, so it cant have been too bad!
Where do I start?
First you need to decide on your learning path. Don’t think of this as a single qualification, think of this as ‘where do I want to be in a year’ from a certification perspective. Some paths require more than one exam for example to achieve the end goal, so you might want to plan which one to do next to make that path as easy to tread as possible.
For me, I am currently working on a lot of Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) deployments, so this made sense to be as up to speed as possible in this area. I’m towards the end of my 12-month plan, and this was the last one in a series that I wanted to achieve.
Learning Material
When I think back to when I first started working with Microsoft products, the online content for their exam prep was, being brutally honest, below par. The resources you could find were peers experiences that were lodged in the depths of a google search, or even amongst the hundreds of pages of an actual paperback BOOK (yes, that’s right, an actual physical book, made from paper and everything). Unless you bought these the day they were released, they were always out of date and the most up to date one was always significantly more expensive than the original. The only real option to get you through the course with any certainty was a paid for instructor led course.
In my case, time is an issue at the moment for me – flat out on engagements, busy family life, Christmas on the horizon, etc. so a week out for intense learning is not something I can spare right now. So, in walks the online learning journey from Microsoft Learn. When I first arrived at the site, it immediately felt useful to me – aesthetically pleasing colours, big self-explanatory boxes to click to help you get where you want – and a search bar, where you can simply enter the exam code you want and find the course material:
A quick scroll down the page and here’s all the modules with headline topics detailed with the four areas the exam professes to challenge detailed:
Each topic then has the various modules associated with it detailed, and an idea of how much time it will take you to digest the information in there:
Within each of these you have specific details of what to expect in the introductions, and then all the technical detail that you need to pass the exam. If you are like me though and the term ‘learn by doing’ applies, this is your lucky day. Each section has example labs for you to work through – all designed to work in test environments rather than a full production environment, so you don’t need to worry about having to build things in live systems. If you have ever attended a classroom instructor led course, half of the day can be lost with setting up labs sometimes – it can be a nightmare! Not so here though, even if you don’t have an environment to complete them in there are screen shots/code snippets for every section so you can see what it actually looks like in the portal.
Some tips for getting the most out of this information:
- Take your time running through the info here. It is generally not a good idea to cram everything into your head two days before the exam and hope for the best – as two days later, it will all be gone again even if you pass the exam!
- Do the labs, if you can. Practical experience is everything in Azure, and if you havent had the experience at deploying the thing you are learning then the labs are a good way of getting that exposure ti clicking buttons/running code, etc.
- If the material doesn’t give you enough detail on a topic, you can always do some extra reading/ask around colleagues, etc. to get a better understanding of what you are reading. Especially if there is an area that you are struggling to assimilate.
- Read the detail for the bits you think you know already, just in case. For example, I thought I knew everything there was to know about VMs in Azure (well, MOST things…), but actually found out that there are limits to the number of machine reboots you can do within an hour in an Azure Resource Manager subscription… This is exactly the kind of random fact that Microsoft throw into an exam to catch you out!
Is this enough?
I think it was almost enough. I like to use practice questions to really cement the knowledge, so my approach was to digest the tech detail from these journeys and then test myself. This highlighted some areas that I was really quite weak in at this stage, so dived back into the material, digested it all in more detail, and then tested myself again. Most of the time, this works for me and as I reach the end of my calendar year of certifications in a considerably better place than when I started, I have to take that as a win!
Ultimately though, there is no guarantee that the above will work for everyone. For some people instructor led is the only way forward, and if that is the case, I know a place you can check out (Microsoft Education – risual) for a substantially better instructor led experience than I have eluded to above! It is totally possible to ‘do it yourself’ though, so why not give it a try!
