Study for your test and you won’t need to guess - Part 1: Add a little ‘Class’ to your studies

This is the first of a three part posting on some of the suggestions that I have on how to prepare for taking a certification test. It is intended for those who are new to the IT environment as well as those that have been in the line of fire for a while and may need to start the certification process or upgrade the certifications that they already have.

In an earlier blog ‘How to take a test’ I gave my suggestions on how to take a test and in a follow-up posting, ‘Guess your best when all else fails’, George Garza gave some suggestions on how to intelligently guess when you get questions that you don’t have a ready answer for. Both postings had good suggestions, but what we forgot to tell you is how to study for the test in the first place. To rectify that oversight (and because I am studying for some tests right now) I thought that it might be helpful to go over what I would recommend to get you ready to take the test.

Take a class or two on the subject (there I got the New Horizons commercial out of the way early). This will show you how you are going to actually USE whatever technology in a practical application. As I mentioned before, knowing how something works is gold when it comes to taking the test and that is what the classroom experience is designed for. If you are new to the IT world the instructor can point out some ‘real world’ scenarios that will help you to learn how to use the product. They can even pull material from other areas so that you can see how everything fits together; once again VERY helpful as you prepare for the exam. If you are an old hand with technology, the instructor can tell you what has changed from one version to the next (and this is the kind of stuff that the vendors like to put on their tests).

Another advantage that you get by taking a class comes from the experience level of the instructor. Most vendors require that the person that is going to be teaching the class be certified in that class (sometimes at a very high level of certification). Even though the class itself is not a ‘test-prep’ environment, the fact that the instructor has taken the exams and can give you tips on how they studied for the exam, is going to be helpful to you (Note: all certifications come with a non-disclosure clause that prevents your instructor from telling you what is on the exam. They can however use the exam prep guides from the vendors to add extra material to the class to introduce concepts that will be covered on the exams).

Part 2 – Studying outside the MOC