I recently obtained the AZ-104 Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certification. This is my second Azure certification after the Data Engineer Associate from last year. I am delibaretly focusing on the Azure platform as I believe deep knowledge on one cloud provider is more beneficial compared to shallow knowledge across multiple providers. And, all my clients over the last two years have used Azure.

For this certification I changed up my study routine a bit and found it really helpful. It has taken me less time this time around and I also felt more confident in my abilities. Therefore I wanted to take a quick note and reflect on the resources I used and methods I tried to follow.

Courses and reading

I first started completing the AZ-104 learning path from A Cloud Guru. I completed all the video lessons as well as the labs. The course covers a lot of ground and does a good job of teaching the concepts, but I found it lacks depth and detail in some areas. I thoroughly enjoyed the labs on the other hand - they are a great resource to actually try out Azure CLI commands or configure network in a hassle-free environment.

To obtain a second perspective, I tackled Microsoft’s own learning path for the Administrator career path, completing again all modules. Here I found the text-based approach actually quite nice. I realized that I needed to focus more when reading compared to watching videos, where I’d drift off more often. Unfortunately the labs did not work with my personal Azure account and I could not get it to work even after some time.

Note taking

I decided to take a deliberate approach in my note taking. In university and my last certification prep I copied text from the learning material into one big note separated by sections. I realized that I gained very little from this approach.

I shifted my approach and forced myself to only write in my own words. Such a seemingly small change had a great effect. I engaged differently with the content, wrangling it in my head while I was trying to explain the concept back to me - in my own words. I rememberd more, I remembered better, I was more engaged.

This ultimately led to a collection of ~50 small notes that I can now easily search for according to their descriptive title, e.g. “Replication strategies as a strong benefit of Azure storage” - or content, because I actually wrote it.

Consistency

Instead of cramming most of my weekly learning into the weekends I tried to be more consistent in my approach. I typically spent an hour before work and an hour to two after work - on most days of the week.

This helped me avoid feeling overwhelmed and keep some excitement for the next day. I sometimes had to end my study session - even when the current topic really interested me.

In the end, I knew that being consistent was the key and combined with solid learning material and engaging note taking it worked out.