My experience taking the Google AAD Certification Exams
The AAD Certification Exams for me was a long journey, I started preparing for the moment the ALC team mentioned that there’ll a certification exams at the end of the Android Developer Fast Track Program on Udacity. I took every lesson seriously as I knew every class will be a step closer to the certification exams I watched a couple of times for concepts that were not care enough on the first viewing. Then came the projects at the end of every lesson, I took those as mini exams and tried to put my best in all the projects, the first project was the Popular Movies Stage 1 where my focus was to make the UI very attractive so as to improve the User Experience on my app, while making the UI attractive I also tried to perfect my understanding of network connectivity using the direct method on android, to also understand layouts and to manipulate them from the Java code, and also to perfect Recycler View rendering on Android. It was a fun and interesting experience, then I got employed and my schedules got tighter and the task became harder to keep up with and I still needed to keep delivering as expected cos I was the leader of my team and I had to lead by example. The second project Popular Movies Stage 2, exposed me to other concepts like scheduling tasks in the background, data persistence in android, android lifecycle concepts, it opened my eyes to much more about the Android framework and what the OS is capable of. I was faced with updating a previous design, but from user perspective of android, I knew I had to keep a lot the same so the User Experience stays the same and at the same time improve on the app and add the required features, at the end of the second project I was tempted to take the AAD Certification exams cos I felt I was ready for it, so I decided to check out the knowledge base required of an applicant before taking the exams and with my current knowledge I was nowhere close to being ready for the exams. I still needed the third module of the program which was the Baking App to be able to stand a chance of passing the exams so I focused my attention on completing the program and understanding all the stated concepts. When the time was right to take the certification exams I found myself still not prepared luckily for me and a couple other learner Philip Okonkwo was done with his own certification exams and he shared insights as to what to perfect before attempting the exams.
I followed the insights and prepared for a week to take the exams on the 8th of July and on the main day I found a good network point in my house and started the exams, when I saw the tasks I was to complete to pass I was hit by a great fear of something I didn’t really prepare for Custom Views it took me the first 5 hours of the exams to device a plan I can work with complete the tasks, but it took me the pointing the test tasks to be able to finally complete the custom view the right way. I was able to complete the given tasks in 45 hours and I used the next 1 hour to check through my work before finally submitting. When I submitted the exams it was then time for ID verification where I was confident that my National ID will pass verification, I was shocked when my ID was not even recognized as an ID to start with. It was a point of confusion for me, I immediately complained to the Andela ALC team who came to my rescue. Less than 48 hours after taking the exams I got a mail from the Certification and I was up for the exit interview.
I took my time to plan the interview for a time where I’ll have both the time to concentrate and a very quiet environment to work with, on the exit interview I was faced with the Nigerian network issues as the audio was really poor all thanks to an understanding interviewer who agreed to interview me via the Zoom meeting software chat interface, the whole interview took less than 10 minutes to complete. Less than 24hrs after the Interview I received the confirmation email and I was to expect my digital badge soonest.
All round my AAD Certification Exams was a memorable experience for me.
