In January 2025, I renewed my AWS Developer Associate certification, which I first obtained in December 2020. My initial attempt resulted in a near-perfect score of 973/1000 – arguably higher than necessary to pass the exam, which is about 720. This time around, I scored 854/1000. In this post, I’ll share my preparation strategies for both attempts and what I learned about studying efficiently for AWS certifications.
Studying for My First Exam (December 2020)
When I decided to pursue AWS certification, I had about a year of hands-on experience, primarily working with serverless services like Lambda, SQS, and S3. Instead of starting with the Cloud Practitioner certification, I jumped straight into the Developer Associate exam. My goal wasn’t just to pass – I wanted to deepen my AWS knowledge for practical application.
Core Study Materials
The backbone of my preparation was Stephane Maarek’s AWS Developer Associate course on Udemy (now updated as “Ultimate AWS Certified Developer Associate 2025 DVA-C02”). What stood out about this course was its hands-on approach, combining theory with practical exercises. The course also highlighted key topics likely to appear in the exam.
Organization with a Mindmap
I organized everything I learned using a mindmap – a study technique that served me well during university. Mindmaps help me create a spatial representation of information, making it easier to recall concepts by visualizing their connections. Here’s what my AWS mindmap looked like on a high level:
Supplementary Resources
To build a deeper understanding of specific services, I supplemented the course by:
- Diving into AWS documentation for selected services (mostly the main page)
- Adding use-case examples to my mindmap
- Taking practice questions found online
- Attempting the official practice exam (which I actually failed the day before the real exam!)
Time Investment
The entire preparation took 4-6 weeks, studying 1-2 hours daily. Looking back at my score of 973/1000, I probably over-prepared.
Studying for My Second Exam (January 2025)
My approach to recertification was quite different from my initial certification. Working at Hashnode, I was using AWS daily, primarily serverless services, though with a broader scope than before. This time, my goal was straightforward: renew the certification efficiently with just enough preparation to pass.
Initial Attempts with Video Courses
I started by revisiting the Udemy course from my first certification. While it had been updated, watching all the videos again seemed inefficient. Also, I wasn’t sure if it was actually up to date or just had some updates to stay in the game.
My friend Sandro was preparing for the exam at the same time. He recommended Andrew Brown’s free YouTube course:
The course is comprehensive – very comprehensive at over 3 days of content. Navigating such a long video proved challenging – it isn’t easy to skip a few minutes here and there –, so I purchased the structured version on ExamPro (also by Andrew Brown) for $29. That course has much smaller chapters (often only a few minutes) that made it easier to navigate. In addition to that, the course contains some example exams, flashcards, and questions after each video. I went through some chapters but I wasn’t patient enough…
A More Efficient Strategy
I pivoted to a three-pronged preparation strategy:
- Practice questions
- My existing mindmap
- AI assistance (Claude)
Through AWS Community Builder, I accessed qa.com’s self-paced learning platform (formerly Cloud Acadamy). Their AWS Developer Associate certification course provided topic-specific questions and a full practice exam. While I passed most topic-specific tests, I have failed the practice exam (68/100).
This should give you a rough idea of how it looks like on qa.com (the knowledge checks contain the topic-specific questions):
Leveraging AI for Targeted Learning
The most novel addition to my study routine was using AI (yeah, time has changed), Claude specifically. I created a dedicated “AWS Certification” project with specific instructions about my background and goals. These were my specific instructions:
I am learning for AWS certificates because I’ll eventually start to freelance soon and certificates will help me get projects.
I am into AWS for >5 years and have made a AWS Associate Developer certificate in December 2020 (but it expired after 3 years). But my day-to-day work is almost exclusively about serveless. Thus I am not proficient in things like VPCs, EC2 etc.
You help me learning AWS and answer my questions. If you are not sure about your answer, please tell me that because I don’t want to learn wrong things.
When writing a response, first decide whether you want to write a short response or a long response. Note your decision inside tags.
If you decide to write a short response, make sure to actually keep it short.
If you decide to write a long response, use some combination of bold, italics, headers, and/or subheaders to make the text more readable.
In addition to that, I have uploaded the official exam guide and a markdown export of my mindmap.
You can the official exam guide on the website for the certification.
I have asked questions like: “What are the most important concepts to pass the exam?“, “What are the most important concepts about XYZ?“, “Provide some example exam questions.” etc. This worked really well to deepen the topics I didn’t feel confident about.
AWS Skill Builder: Official Practice
As a final preparation step, I signed up for AWS Skill Builder ($29/month) to access their practice questions. This turned out to be a good decision – the questions closely mirrored the actual exam format and difficulty level. Being created by AWS themselves, these practice questions provided the most accurate representation of what to expect in the certification exam. I have passed all sets of questions with being about ~80% correct. At that time, my exam was already scheduled.
Time Investment and Reflection
This preparation took about two weeks of focused study, averaging over 2 hours daily (3-4 hours on some days).
In retrospect, I could have been even more efficient by focusing exclusively on practice questions, mindmap review, and AI-assisted learning from the start. My score of 854/1000 achieved my goal of efficiently renewing the certification, validating my (somewhat) focused preparation strategy.
Conclusion
Having gone through the AWS Developer Associate certification twice with different approaches, I can confidently say there’s no one-size-fits-all preparation strategy. Your approach should align with your goals and current experience level.
If you’re new to AWS or aiming to build a strong foundation like I was in 2020, a comprehensive course with hands-on practice combined with detailed note-taking (like my mindmap approach) can be extremely valuable. However, if you’re renewing your certification or already have substantial AWS experience, focusing on practice questions, reviewing specific topics, and using tools like AI for targeted learning can be more time-efficient.
The key takeaways from my experience:
- Align your preparation intensity with your goals – whether that’s learning deeply or efficiently passing
- Use practice questions strategically, especially official AWS resources, to gauge your readiness
- Organize your knowledge in a way that works for you (mindmaps worked great for me)
- Take advantage of modern tools like AI to fill knowledge gaps quickly
- Most importantly, build on your practical experience – it’s the foundation that makes certification preparation much more manageable