After passing the AZ-900 exam a few weeks ago, I decided to get back to working towards the AZ-204 exam. (TL;DR: I may have overestimated my readiness for that one.)
For the AZ-900, I’d paid for it myself, using a 50% discount from the ESI program, and then got work to reimburse me for it, after passing. That was somewhat useful, since it gave me an excuse to get set up in our expense system, so now I have that ready if I ever need to submit any more expenses.
For the AZ-204, I decided to reach out to the person at work who got me a free voucher when I took the PL-900 in 2023. I wasn’t expecting much, but I figured it would be OK to ask. Well, it turns out that she did have some vouchers, and she gave me one, but they expire on June 30, so I need to use it before then. That’s actually not a bad thing; having a deadline will make me a bit more likely to apply myself, and either commit, or give up and move on to something else.
Just to see how close I was to being ready, I took the Microsoft practice exam this week. I scored only 60% on it, so I’m not nearly ready for the real exam. And some of the questions on the MS practice exam go deeper than a lot of the prep material I’m working through does. I may actually have to learn all of this stuff to pass the exam, not just watch a bunch of videos and take notes.
So the question arises: Is it worth doing the work, just to pass an exam and have a certification on my resume? And the answer is, of course, that we need to determine if the prep work has value, in and of itself. Would it be good if I knew more about, for instance, Docker? Yes. Would it be good if I knew more about a lot of these other Azure services? Probably. So if “doing the work” is fun and useful, it’s worth doing. If I pass the test, great. If I don’t, at least I learned some new stuff. (Maybe I’ll forget it all in a year, but maybe some of it will stick and/or be useful in the future.)