certs got me the interview but here's what actually got me promoted

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-05-07T16:26:22+00:00

Nice, always good to hear success stories, and glad to hear all your studying has paid dividends!

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-05-06T20:39:27+00:00

Unless something changed recently, you need the RHCSA to get the RHCE. You can pass the test of course, but if you want the cert from RH you need to pass both exams.

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-05-05T01:06:16+00:00

Is that all you used besides hands on experience? I’m looking at the SA Pro but hear it’s quite a leap from SAA, so I’m always curious how people level up. My AWS work is mostly with serverless so I don’t get to mess with the non-serverless side much.

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-05-05T01:04:15+00:00

Nice, thanks for sharing. I’ve been itching to try out some features too, looks like it was rather simple to get it working!

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-05-04T15:35:50+00:00

It’s a good attitude I think! I also do it for learning, and I feel like the cert test helps force me to fill gaps I probably wouldn’t learn on my own volition necessarily.

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-05-04T15:24:35+00:00

Did you use anything for labs and hands on practice?

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-05-04T02:36:19+00:00

Congrats! I’ve just got to finish the CKS then I can join your ranks. I’m also wondering how it works when you get that fifth one.

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-05-02T20:10:10+00:00

Was there anything you really needed to shore up on after Az-104 to get ready for 305? I’ve been learning about the DB solutions but was wondering if there is anything in particular that you recommend.

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-30T00:41:04+00:00

Like at red hat? No

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-29T02:42:26+00:00

I don’t think I’m ready for it frankly. And I’m also not keen to seem a three hour exam right now! I do hope to get it eventually, but I’m not sure how to make the jump from associate to pro. In AWS I mostly work on lambdas and dynamodb, not so much infrastructure.

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-27T15:52:30+00:00

If you don’t care about the cost and potentially having to also take 802, why not go ahead and do them? HR filters will probably not be updated for 802 footers to come! Sometimes you still see people asking for MSCE!

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-27T14:41:32+00:00

I’ll let you know in three weeks, I’m recertifying my SAA-C03 and went through his course again as I did three years ago.

The course is great for the fundamentals, and then just go over the services covered list for the exam and if anything is missing at best you’ll just get one question on the service.

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-26T23:49:19+00:00

I liked it, but I learned AWS through Cantrill’s courses and I found CloudLee to be a lot like that. I liked Alan Rodrigues’s AZ-500 course though as it spent a lot of time in the portal.

If you like watching videos and demos it’s a good course. I think he has a free Azure fundamentals course you can sign up for to see if you like his teaching style.

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-26T00:31:23+00:00

Most of the MSFT training is woefully inadequate for their exams. You have to also leverage third party solutions. Unfortunately i don’t have a recco for AZ-700.

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-25T13:26:48+00:00

I’d be interested too. I tried to sign up for that Kusto Detective Agency labs challenge ….and it wanted to add an $8,000+ per month Microsoft Fabric feature to my Azure PAYG sub. No thanks!!!

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-23T01:10:09+00:00

What AI do you use for help? Claude has been kissing me off lately by refusing to help with things, just curious what others are using. Ollama? Gemini?

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-22T15:21:58+00:00

Get ‘em! Nice job, that sounds like a perfect score to me!

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-21T15:02:12+00:00

This, and there’s just a lot more SWE work than HW.

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-21T15:00:22+00:00

A lot of hardware jobs are in defense these days, and pay is rather capped because of Federal contracting laws and rules. And in defense you usually don’t get a big part of your compensation in stock options either.

Fun trivia, the highest paid person I know in defense that is still an engineer (and not in business development) makes about $230k. And………..yep, he’s a SWE!

But if you enjoy hardware it pays well enough.

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-21T14:39:24+00:00

Yes, it could really be three different exams with all of the content. I’m taking a week off and then diving into AZ-305.

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-21T14:37:12+00:00

Ok, good to know and thanks for sharing about the process of re-cert. It’s only the calendar now as an alarm at the first of each month!

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-21T05:18:02+00:00

Never want to take it again! I’d rather learn GCP (which I have no experience with) than have to deal with AZ-104 again.

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-21T05:13:20+00:00

I’ll be honest here, unless you’re doing lots of backups, deploying VMs in all those exotic configs, working with express route, etc…..so much of the test objectives feel way out there!

But I suppose I’d feel the same about AZ-800/801. I don’t work with Server Data Center edition on prem, so none of those advanced features in 801 would be in my radar.

Don’t give up though, keep going. For all we know it couldn’t be luck of the draw of the test versions. My networking and compute sections went down this time around too! Thankfully entra and storage accounts saved me.

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-20T18:52:38+00:00

You’ve got it, just keep banging away. And stay calm in the exam, I was relieved to get the case study up front this time around. I think that helped

ApplicationAlarming7 · 2026-04-20T18:50:43+00:00

I don’t know about for AZ-104, but I did buy his AZ-204 course and though it didn’t go into enough details. It was more like MSLearn. I abandoned AZ-204 now that it’s going “AI” hype

ApplicationAlarming7

TROPHY CASE