How I passed AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam in 2 weeks and so can you !

Cong Pham
Geek Culture
Published in
5 min readFeb 9, 2022

I am a web developer and I have been longing to learn about Cloud Computing technology for a long time. It is a very powerful tool that a lot of software companies are using and a very popular job requirement the recruiters are looking for. As part of my current job and my knowledge curiosity, I was wondering how I can deep-dive into this new area and where I could get my knowledge certified. That’s how I found this Amazon Web Service foundational level certificate exam that helped me gain basic knowledge of AWS platform. For more information about the certificate and what it is good for, please visit Amazon Web Service official website.

Because I needed to understand Cloud Computing as much as possible so I could use it in my current job, I challenged myself to sign up for the exam 2 weeks in advanced. Looking through the exam guide from the AWS official website, there are an enormous amount of information you need to absorb in a short period of time. Don’t be worried, I was concerned too, but after looking for some online materials and making plan. I was able to finish the learning stage just a little more than a week, and then focus on solving many practice exams and patching learning gaps.

I found a reliable AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01) course on Cloud Guru that is a about 10 hours study. It did cost me $35 subscription fee but a lot of people recommended it. Also, I paid around $15 for a set of 6 practice exams on Udemy. (I am not being sponsored by any of these platforms. This is the actual learning materials I prepared to tackle this exam)

A. Learning Stage (8 days)

I used the Cloud Guru course in this stage. There are four learning areas that I need to prepare:

  1. Foundations of Cloud Computing (1 hour to study, 30 mins to review)
  2. Technology (5 hours to study, 3 hours to review)
  3. Security and Compliance (2 hours of study, 1 hour to review)
  4. Pricing, Billing, and Governance (1 hours of study, 30 minutes)

I made a plan as follow.

Day 1) Complete study for chapter Foundations of Cloud Computing (1 hour)

Day 2) Study Technology chapter (1.5 hours) and review chapter Foundations of Cloud Computing (0.5 hour)

Day 3) Study Technology chapter (1.5 hours) and review what I learned yesterday on Technology (0.5 hour)

Day 4) Study Technology chapter (2 hours)

Day 5) Review Technology chapter (2 hours)

Day 6) Study Security and Compliance chapter (2 hours) and study Pricing, Billing and Governance chapter (1 hour)

Day 7) Review Security and Compliance chapter (1 hour) and review Billing and Governance chapter (30 minute)

Day 8) Review all four chapters (3 hours)

As you can see, I put a lot of times for reviewing and I always review on the next day because it helps you refresh your memory and keep it in your mind longer. Please do customize this plan to your need.

Also, there are so many services that I need understand in a short period of time, and the best way to remember them for me is to memorize their logo symbols or make up stories about them. For example, AWS Lightsail logo symbol looks like a boat that is moving fast,

AWS Lightsail logo

so I imagine that if I can put my application there and it would help me quickly launch it. Or, AWS Athena logo looks like a magnifying glass with a bucket that is focused in the middle,

AWS Athena logo

So it suggests to me that this is the service for analyzing (because of the magnifying glass) data (sometimes people use the word ‘bucket’ as synonym for data in a specific region). Trust me this method works very well and it would help you memorize a lot better if you can associate it with something you know, especially with more than 20 AWS services that you need to know and memorize for the exam.

B. Practice Stage (6 days)

This is the most important stage. I purchased the set of 6 practice exams on Udemy, and I also had practice exams from Cloud Guru course. So I tried to solve 2 to 3 exams per day. The exam is 90 minutes with 65 multiple choice questions, I tried solving each practice exam under 60 minutes and use the last 30 minutes to review my answers. I would recommend not to look up for answers during completing the practice exams so you would be used to the exam environment with no help and also to see how your real performance is on the practice exams. After completing each practice exam, I looked for incorrect questions and saved them into a separate note so I can look for related lectures and review them later. I kept doing this from the first day of this stage until the fifth day.

I usually don’t like cramping everything on the final day before the exam. So I just redid all the questions that I did wrong that I saved in the note while doing practice exams earlier and rewarded myself with a warm big meal.

Tips for doing the exam:

I only have one tip that I always use in every single exam:

I would tell myself before going into the exam that I have studied with my best possible effort and if I fail this exam, I will study again and retry it.

I know it sounds a little weird but it does give me the confidence that I have done my absolute best so I can be very focus while doing the exam. With that, I haven’t failed any exam so far.

Conclusion:

Once you pass the exam, you will be rewarded with an online badge that you can include it on Linkedln to impress the potential employers.

Cong’s AWS certificate

So it costs me about $50 for the online materials to study for this course. You could cut back on the Udemy exam set and it will be fine to just practice the exams on Cloud Guru.

This is just a multiple choice exam for knowledge acknowledgement but not experience. I would still recommend to actually build something out of these AWS services because that would be the skill you need to work on your job or build your own business not the certificate.

Be free to adjust this plan based on your need and circumstances. Goodluck!

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Cong Pham
Cong Pham

Written by Cong Pham

Hi! My name is Cong from Calgary, Canada. I have a Bachelor degree in Software Engineering and I am trying to share everything I know with you guys :)

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