HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate

A friend of mine had recently passed the Terraform Associate certfication, and had encouraged me to also take the exam.

Having had used Terraform for a few years now as my preferred tool for Infrastucture as code (IaC), I decided that it would be a good idea to prove my knowledge on it.

My Study Approach

The first thing I did, without even looking at the content, was scheduling the exam 2 weeks from the current date. I'm a strong believer in this strategy; you essentially create a deadline for yourself by doing this, which puts you under time pressure, and helps you stay focused on your study.

While I understand it's a bit stressful for some, it is a strategy that has worked quite well for me.

Comforted by the fact that already had a few years of solid Terraform experience under my belt, I decided to purely use Udemy practice exams for my revision. I personally found that these exam questions were very similar to the ones that appear in the exam.

Taking 3 practice exams each day was enough. I made sure to review every exam, note down which answers I got wrong, and make sure I didn't get them wrong next time.

After two weeks of constant study and scoring 95%+ on the practice exams, I was happy to pass the exam today with a mark of 84%.

Exam Tips

I usually encourage going through the exam in Three Passes:

• 1st Pass: Go through each question and answer as many as you can. If you don't know the answer, flag it and move on to the next one. Keep going until you reach the end.
• 2nd Pass: Go through each of your flagged questions, and take time to think about the answer. If you still can't think of the answer, leave it flagged. Keep going until you have reached the end the flagged questions.
• 3rd Pass: Go through ALL questions, whether they have a flag or not. Take this time to verify that your answer is correct. Make adjustments if required. Repeat this until the timer on the exam ends.




Some other recommendations/tips:

• Use up ALL of the exam time. Do not finish it early.
• Even though it is deprecated, terraform taint still appears in the exam. Make sure you know what it does.
• If you haven't used terraform before, I would highly recommend going through the exam objectives and actually getting hands on experience with Terraform for each of the objectives.

Conclusion

Overall, this exam is easier than the public cloud vendor certifications out there. With a few weeks of solid study and practice, you should be able to pass easily 🙂

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the exam, please feel free to get in touch via any of the contact methods above.

Good Luck!