This week’s entry for Reaching for the Cloud slightly differs from the usual content I publish. It is unrelated to security or cloud strategy/technology and is more focused on a personal challenge or journey.
About a week or so ago, someone made (probably a flippant) comment, indicating that they expect me to attain all the Microsoft cloud certifications. This comment has a reason; more will be revealed when I can formally share the news. As I think is clear from my previous posts, I tend to interpret these types of interactions as literal, so over the last couple of days I have started thinking about what this means and how to achieve this goal.
To give some context, although I have a technical background, my recent roles have been focused on business development and developing strategic partnerships with Microsoft. As a result, technical certifications have not been at the forefront. While I have the AZ-900 and SC-900, I forgot to renew my AZ-104 certification, so I am almost starting from scratch regarding the certification journey.
My first challenge is prioritising and planning the learning elements and certification paths I must complete.
Structure of Microsoft Certifications
Before I delve into my prioritisation and planning, let’s briefly cover how Microsoft certifications are structured.
Fundamentals
Microsoft certifications are divided into technology areas and by complexity (for want of a better word), starting with the 900-level certifications, which provide a broad overview of the technology and are targeted at people new to this topic.
Associate & Expert
Next comes the role-based certifications, which, as the name implies, are tailored for people who perform a particular role within a partner or client organisation, and these are further split into Associate and Expert levels. For example, the AZ-104 (Azure Administrator Associate) is focused on users who need to administer one or more Azure instances and includes topics such as deploying and managing virtual machines, storage, networks, and identities, and is labeled as an associate level. In contrast, the AZ-305 (Azure Solutions Architecture Expert) certification is focused on solution architects. It covers a broader set of skills, enabling practitioners to develop solution architectures across the whole Azure stack.
Speciality
Finally, Microsoft has four certifications that have been categorised as Specialty certifications. These are deeper certifications focused on either a specific technology or perhaps a third-party technology, such as the SAP Workloads specialty or Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty.
Certifications Paths
To complicate things a little, some of the certifications have pre-requisite certifications. Again, using the AZ-305 certification as an example requires passing the AZ-104, i.e., the Azure Administrator Associate exam. Again, to make things more complicated, some certifications allow you to take one of two pre-requisite certifications. For example, AZ-400 (DevOps Engineer Expert) give you the choice of AZ-104 (Azure Administrator Associate) or AZ-204 (Azure Developer Associate) as the pre-requisite certification.
So to certify as an Azure Solutions Architect Expert, the path would be as follows.
Please note the AZ-900 is not required, just recommended.
The Plan
To prioritise the certification paths, I decided to look at two criteria: firstly, how necessary this skillset is to the business and my role, and secondly, how experienced I already feel in that subject area. This was trickier, but I felt that re-doing the AZ-104 for example, would not be as beneficial as taking, say, the DP-100, as one of the few areas that I have never really worked is in the big data/analytics field, so I feel that this would provide a bigger “impact” than focusing on areas I already (perhaps incorrectly) feel more comfortable in.
As a result, I plan to approach this by focusing on the 900 certifications first, as this validates the broad knowledge of the Microsoft ecosystem, including Azure, security, data, AI, and modern work. I will start with AI-900 and work across the other 900-level certifications.
Then the focus would switch to the Data & AI stream, as I believe that this is the most important focus for both IBM and Microsoft for the next year or so.
The good thing is that I have not set a deadline; this may be a mistake, but with work and personal commitments, it will be challenging to commit to a specific timeframe. However, I am going to commit to providing updates on my progress, not necessarily in the form of study guides, etc., but I will attempt to identify key subjects and activities and share them here and on my YouTube channel.
The Microsoft Cloud Blog 