Before you even start studying .. think about your destination. What job do you want, what promotion, what projects do you want to work on. Then, do a REALISTIC assessment of where your skills are right now. Chances are, if you have been "unlucky" with job hunting right now, you/your skills are the issue.
Then, work out what you need to do over the next 6 months to get to that point.
- Pick which topics or certifications you want to study for. Before looking at content (HOW) you need to know WHAT you are aiming for.
- Choose your training vendor. Don't look at price, look at value. Is the course skills focused or exam focused. Is it up to date, or not. Does the instructor(s) provide help?
- Build a study plan for each course/topic
- Join the community at https://discord.gg/tsd - helping others will build your skills, you will learn a lot and hiring managers often lurk looking for potential stars.
- Build your professional network - work on your LinkedIn profile. Make sure it's up to date, matches your skills and has no lies or exaggeration.
- Find a mentor, someone who knows your industry. Whatever the cost (time/effort/money) this will pay back 100x.
- Work on your CV/Resume - if you are new to IT/AWS use your demo/course/mini projects as experience.
read/listen/watch ... understand ... compress...write note....make flashcards
- Focus only on quality. Concise quality and full understanding
- Beware the risk of passivley watching video after video, you need to focus on UNDERSTANDING not watching, see https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn for more (free) advice on how to learn (from professors of neuroscience)
- Everything is about maximising the effectiveness not the quantity
- Study smarter and not harder. Sleep. Take breaks. Short notes, very few screenshots. If procrastination is a thing (it will be) google "Tim Urban TED" and pomodoro technique to FOCUS
- Do lots of lab exercises - practise what you’ve just watched, in different ways, experiment and break then fix things.
- Get hands on. Do the labs/demos Adrian designed for his course. If there are any areas that confuse you, do them again. Dive in and play around. That will help you in your career far more than simply memorizing the concepts.
- Use the quiz at the end of each section to anchor knowledge learned.
- Do not move on until you fully understand the content in the videos, ask on slack if your arent 100% sure
- Confused? Have a question? Ask on the slack community. Use
#exam-question-corner
to discuss answers with others in the community.
- Go through the course in the order the videos are. Adrian has set up this order for a reason
- Dont move on to the next video until you fully understand the present one
- Take notes as you go. YOUR OWN NOTES. Stop the video so you can write your notes with pen and paper
- At the end of the video, clean up your notes and make sure they have the 5-7 things you learned in the video
- Make flashcards from your notes with the most important things to remember. Do it in a question / answer form. Use anki (search for it)
- Go on to next video
- Once you are finished with the complete course AND NOT BEFORE, buy the corresponding tutorialsdojo.com practice exams
- Once you are consistently scoring > 90% book the exam.