First time certification will be your first good or worst experience, but if you want differentiate yourself with the other. Certification will give you better understanding, better skill, and better insight about the technical competency. This tips will give you a non-technical tips about how to prepare your first innteranational certification.
Tips 1. Find and understand your certification competency
Visit Microsoft learning web site, find your certification that you want to obtain. For example, as a daily user of Visual Studio ALM, I might choose visual studio for my certification.
Tips 2. Understand how many exam that you need to obtain your certification
You will see several grade for your certification. For example, on Visual Studio, you will have MTA and MCSD certification. If you don’t have any experience on certification entry level such MTA will help you much to understand the ‘look and feel’ of certification, but if you already join others certification from other provider such as IBM, COMPTIA, or CISCO. You might choose direct expert level certification which are MCSD. On this step, you can choose your path such as MSCD: Applcation Lifecycle Management.
You will see that you need to pass 496, 497, and 498. It means that you need to pass the three certification to get MCSD.
Tips 3. If multiple exams exist choose the easiest one
On this example, Visual Studio ALM has three exams. it depends on your competency that you already have to choose it first. You don’t need to pass incrementally i.e. 496, 497, 498. you can choose one for example you can pass 497 first after that 496 and the last is 498. it depends on your confidence which one is the easiest one between them.
Tips 4. Find the preparation the skill measured on the exam
On the exam page for example 497, you will find two valuable information. The first one is skill measured and preparation material. Skill measured will give you knowledge about the exam composition. it has percentage on each topic. For example Manage Test case will have 30-35% it means it will have between 12-15 questions (one exam has assumption 40 questions). The higher precentage means you should understand the detail of the topic.
Tips 5. Preparing the exam by learning the materials
On the same page, you will have the preparation material. it depends on the exam. some of the preparation material will have one of more resources such as
if you have additional budget my advise is to join Classroom lerning. it will give you better learning experience and discussion with the traoner and former student that already join the certification. However, if you have limited budget like myself, I suggest you to find a book on MSPress and schedule yourself for MVA training
Tips 6. Practices make perfect
You need at least one or two week to prepare and to schedule your exam to certiport or pearson vue. please try to understand the type of question, practice with it, and try to pass any practice examination on MVA, Books, or any learning material.
Tips 7. Join your exam and never cheat yourself
Exam is to proof that you have a competency. Never put a cheat effort on it. Learn and prepare it well to obtain the certification and the most important things is your knwowledge that you can share to the ICT society.
That’s it prepare your certification well