A 3 month journey to your first 2 AWS Certifications for free
That's right. Free. Because we live that life.
When a person first hears the words “free”, their mind usually goes one of to two places: “impossible” and “scam”. And while this can be the case sometimes, a lot of the time it is simply the result of our personal belief as a society that nothing is ever truly fair; which is, well, fair enough. But, as I have discovered over the past few years, true freedom is the leveraging of one’s time and knowledge in order to gain more than one gives. To find the bugs in the code, the actually useful 2-for-the-price-of-1 offers at the supermarket, the little obscure tax breaks that you qualify for. This is the spice of life, this is what it means to be truly free.
Now, for those who tolerated that monologue, here are the steps that you need to take to get 2 AWS certifications for free (voucher and study content) within a three month time period.
Part 1: The voucher
This is the part that people get the most worked up over. Yet, it is the part that will come easiest. It is simple a matter of time and focus. AWS has provided the resources for this in practically broad daylight. We need only look slightly past the surface.
Join the AWS Emerging Talent Community
The AWS Emerging Talent Community is a program undertaken by AWS to gather interested AWS learners into a forum where they can learn more about AWS, communicate with other AWS community members and earn points for daily logins and other challenges that they can use on rewards.
I discovered the ETC just like I discover everything else: by complete coincidence. I completed an AWS Academy course and was invited into the Emerging Talent Community. After I joined, the point system was fairly easy to pick up. I didn’t know about the voucher rewards until I started snooping around the About pages. But, for me to properly explain it to you, first you have to join the community itself, so here are the steps to doing that:
Go here
Fill out the form and ask to join
Wait
And that’s it! Most of the time you’ll get in, if you don’t they’ll give you a reason. But you probably will. All of this will happen via e-mail.
There are tons of challenges and puzzles and case studies for you to look over if you want. Most of them are actually quite interesting.
Work towards the vouchers
I say work, what I actually mean is “open the website once a day for like 2 minutes and get your points”. You remember that thing about filling a bucket with a drop of water every day for a year? That applies here too. It’s not a lot of work, and at the end of it you get quite a significant reward. Every day you log in, you get points in daily increments of 5→10→15→20→25→back again. So, by my maths that is 75 points every 5 days just for logging in which is 450 points in a 30 day month just for logging in every day. In addition to that you’ll get an average of 20-25 points a day and I believe around 800 points to start with.
Let’s put some context to these points. In about a month, a small challenge opens up that looks like this:
In this, you have to complete a few Skill Builder-based tasks and submit proof of completion. This, once verified, adds a 100% AWS Cloud Practitioner Voucher to the rewards store. The price for that voucher is 3500 points. On purchase, the voucher is emailed to you.
After about 3 months, another challenge comes up, this time for an Associate-level voucher:
Once you complete the challenge like you did before, you can choose from one of the three AWS Associate-level (Solutions Architect, SysOps, Developer) certifications and it will appear in the rewards store at the cost of 4200 points.
Part 2: Preparing for the exam
A lot of people spend quite a bit of money on preparation materials for the examinations. However, much of the time you do not have to. Here are a couple of great methods to prepare for your exam for free:
Sign up for AWS Skill Builder and AWS Educate
Chances are that you may have to do this anyways for the ETC challenges and sometimes to get into the ETC itself. AWS Skill Builder (Google it, I’m not doing all your work for you) and AWS Educate (see Skill Builder) are great resources that contain most of the learning content that you may need to prepare for your exam. I highly recommend the exam prep courses which are named as such for all the associate exams, the Cloud Quest video game for Cloud Practitioners (it’s actually quite fun) and the Exam Readiness guide for DevOps Professional even if you’re not giving that exam (it’ll help you understand the question logic).
AWS Ramp-Up Guides
If you go to this page you will find guides which can server as a learning path for your certification journey. It will carry you over the syllabus for the exam in a guided way, essentially serving as a checklist for the required topics. It has the links to all the Skill Builder and Educate reosurces you may need to complete the guide as well as other important resources for your exam preparations. Search the Ramp-Up Guides by roles and you’ll find the ones you need for Practitioner and the Associate exams.
AWS Training Resource Collection
AWS has training resource collections (like this one for Developer Associate) for every certification exam. It contains power hourse, the syllabus and a collection of most of their free examination resources. Highly recommended as a sort of headquarters for your certification preparation.
AWS FAQs and Whitepapers
Go to any of the certification exam pages on AWS for the exam you’re about to give and you’ll find a set of FAQs and Whitepapers related to the exam you’re about to give. This is official AWS documentation and Q&A material and a lot of the questions are designed keeping them in mind. So these are a must for any exam prep.
Part 3: Giving the exam
Schedule your exam with PearsonVUE once you feel that you are ready to give your exam. You can apply your voucher code on the payment page. If you haven’t felt the satisfaction of applying a 100% voucher on an exam before, let me tell you, it’s quite the experience. If you do the prep and if you’re focused, there’s no way you’ll fail. But here are a couple of tips to help you anyway:
Read the last line of the question first, it’ll help you form the context in your mind, then read the question and only read the choices after that.
Look for keywords, some keywords are always associated with certain services (for example, the term Object Storage is always associated with AWS S3).
It is almost never the option that says something like “don’t do anything”, “this is not something that you can do”, “don’t change anything” etc. They usually don’t try to trick you like that.
Conclusion
I have put the time for your journey as 3 months for these two certifications but, that is not a solid estimate. There are other factors that contribute to this. Sometimes, you don’t collect enough points, sometimes you just want the associate without the practitioner, and so on. The point is, this is your journey, and this is one of many guides you could take on it. This is just advice, what you do with it is up to you. But, if you’ve come this far, you probably want a certification so this guide will probably help you get one.
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