My first FAIL!

There’s nothing quite like that short lived ‘buzz’ after walking out a tech exam with a big phat PASS! Back in January however, I came out of the examination room with what’s best described as a ‘stunned stagger’ in place of the more familiar ‘victory swagger’ 🙂

What beat me? Office 365, 70-347 – Enabling Office 365 Services. I only missed it by 2 questions but it may have well have been 10 with the amount of guess work I was doing. I knew I wasn’t fully prepared but I thought I had enough knowledge to scrape on through. I felt this way a couple of times in the past and it always worked out, but this time it didn’t. My Powershell skills are pretty decent but my practical experience around the Skype for Business and SharePoint online modules let me down… not to mention Staffhub, I got a few questions on that and I was like “What’s a Staffhub?”… yeah, oh dear…

I managed to comfortably pass 70-347 at the end of March and what a relief that was. Not only did I get the certification, but I can now avoid that walk of shame leaving the test centre, which was quite painful first time around.

It will come as no surprise but all it needed was some time and effort. I ran up a couple of O365 E3 trials and got stuck into the practical, making sure I addressed my weaknesses, and got on top of the newer apps and services. I also used the free tutorials by Platform Scholar which I highly recommend for anyone who is thinking of going for the O365 MSCA. Here’s a link to the channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJuU1BAaEeVMTSopVX05Q9g

They are updated pretty regularly and cover both 70-346, Managing Identities & Requirements and 70-347 and Enabling Office 365 Services, which combined give you the MCSA. More detail on that here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/learning/mcsa-office365-certification.aspx

I’m taking this failure as positive, as it has eradicated any complacency I had lurking in the system, which should help with the other exams I have lined up for this year. A bunch of Citrix renewals, Architecting Azure Solutions and Windows Server 2016. The fun and learning never ends…

Good luck to anyone taking the exam and feel free to ask any questions, cheers