Azure Certification Renewal Season is OPEN!
Azure peeps, you may have heard, Microsoft has finally established its exam renewal program. If you have certifications expiring in less than 6 months, you probably have received an email…or will be soon. So what does it mean and entail to recertify your Azure credentials?
TL;DR — It is not too bad and don’t sweat it. I have 5 to renew in 2020 and already knocked down 2 of them.
Eligibility
Azure Certifications are valid for 2 years. 6 months prior to expiry, you will become eligible to renew it online. To be clear, you are renewing a certification title, not specific exams. Therefore, if you are Azure Solutions Architect Expect Certified, you need to complete 1 renewal, not 2. Further, the renewal is based on a specific title and can be done independently of its pre-requisites. This means that you don’t need to recertify Azure Admin before recertifying the Solutions Architect. Although, logically you likely completed the Azure Admin before the Architect; thus would become eligible to renew first.
Recertification Process
The whole process starts with the email from Microsoft advising you that you are eligible to renew a certification. The email will catch your attention with “Action required — Your Microsoft Certification will expire in 180 days!”. This occurs 6 months prior to expiry. Microsoft is giving you a full 6 months to renew. If you miss the deadline, my understanding is that you will be no longer holding this certification and will have to retake the required exams. Using the Solutions Architect as an example, you would need to rewrite both AZ-3xx exams. So, its in your best interest to renew it and not procrastinate.
Now that you’ve established you have an exam to upgrade, click on the link in the email to get started. You will then need to login to the account you typically register your exams under. You may at this point have to link your Microsoft Learn account. If you don’t have one…you should and will likely need to create one. This is because the recertification is done online, without proctoring, using the Microsoft Learn platform.
Microsoft will recommend a series of Microsoft Learn modules to brush up your skills in preparation for the renewal exam. Do not forget to click Show More at the bottom of the page or you might miss out on some content.
The million dollar question: do you wing the renewal and go for it…or spend some time to prepare.
My advice is to review the modules descriptions that Microsoft is suggesting to take (take the hint!). My experience, because I like to be in the school of hard knocks, is to heed that advice! On the Solutions Architect renewal, I was hammered on Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery; I repeat hammered. And by hammered, I mean the minute details of the matrix of where and when you can do a specific type of backup and restore. I had to do some remedial classes after that beat down.
All in all, expect to spend about 3 hours to go through the material suggested. Skim over stuff that you know; dig deeper where you feel short.
Exam Format
Now let’s talk about the exam format. Similar to the actual certification exams, the questions are multiple choice. Some questions were yes/no answers. There are no case studies, no “put these steps in the right order”, no multiple selections.
The exam is about 25+ questions and this will differ from certification to certification. The exam is online through the Microsoft Online platform.
Unlike live exams, the questions in this exam cannot be reviewed and the exam is linear; you cannot return to a previous question to change your answer.
If you fail the renewal, you can take it again right away. After the second failure, you are given a 24 hour timeout between each attempt.
The best part is that renewals are free as in beer!
My experience so far
Having completed 2 renewals out of 5, I feel pretty good about the outcome. The Solutions Architect was definitely hard. They questioned you heavily on the ability to recover IaaS systems and Azure SQL. Sprinkle some Security Center questions and that is the exam. All good subjects to be up to speed on; so read up.
The Azure DevOps one was interesting, but from a product perspective. The content was heavily geared towards the GitHub ecosystem (repos, actions, scripts). This tells me that Azure DevOps as a platform will be shifting towards a merger with GitHub over time. In some ways, I appreciate the consolidation. Azure DevOps was never made as SaaS as the AWS equivalents, you have to stand up an organization and a lot of scaffolding before using the components (repos, pipelines, boards, artifacts). On AWS, each service stands alone and can be coupled as you need (codebuild, codecommit, etc).
I hope this was useful in planning your renewal journey. Part of me wishes Microsoft would also adopt the AWS methodology when you write a higher exam, it automatically renews the lower one. But again, spending ~ 3 hours to get a cert renewed is not the end of the world and its free.
