Picture: My score

The amount I studied & languages

As for my preparation, I simply studied the Azure fundamentals learning path by Microsoft and no more. I finished the last chapter three hours prior to the test and spent the final hour looking through my notes to recap the whole course. That’s it. The test doesn’t require you to prepare a lot in advance, so it is better to book the test before studying in order to maximize time efficiency. During booking, remember to select the language that fits you most, then change the language; I choose English as my test language, as I tend to read English documentation more quickly, and it is best when the learning material shares the same language as the test language.

Active recall - the study method I used

By the time I start to study for the exam, I was inspired by active recall, which is a very effective learning method. I learned this technique from the youtube video by Ali Abdaal, which you can check out here. The core idea is that we learn better by getting out information from our brain rather than cramming everything into it. So, things such as teaching others or taking mock tests are helpful because they are using the information you have already known but are not quite organized yet. Basically, what I did is to copy/paste the whole article to Onenote, then highlight the important parts of the article. After reading through the whole article and finishing the problems, I try to construct a mind map through pen and paper, so I get a clear hierarchy of the topic. What I focused on is the services provided by Azure - what is the name, and what does the service do. The questions usually give you a situation and ask you what service can solve the problem. This strategy works out (at least for me) since I read the chapters just once and crammed the mind maps that I made one hour before the test. Picture: A snippet of my notes on Onenote.

Picture: Mind map with pen and paper.

Would it be difficult if I have no technical background?

I would think for that case, you might need to spend a little extra time on the cloud computing concepts, but not by much. As the percentage goes, it only takes up 20% of the whole exam, and the concepts are also pretty easy to understand, so this shouldn’t be a problem. The other 80% are made up of different Azure services and their uses, so this should be the same difficulty for everyone.

TL;DR: Study using active recall and link real-life situations with the Microsoft services.