How I got OCI(Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) certified?

Summarised tips for clearing the OCI certification

My OCI Foundations Associate certificate

In this post, I am going to share my experience of preparing for the OCI certification. I gave it in the month of June 2022 and passed it with 88% in one attempt. The exam code is IZ0–1085–21 for this certification.

Major pointers to keep in mind

Below are a few summarised points from my understanding of the OCI training material and the certification both.

1. Go through the official training material on oracle cloud website . They have a learning path for each of the cloud service similar to AWS . OCI foundation learning path comes along with certification and it is for free.
2. Oracle has retired the exam curriculum from 30th June 2022 onwards and new exam topics are now added and will be asked in the certification.
3. If you have some basic understanding of Cloud from your work experiences working in any other Cloud provider like AWS, Azure , GCP etc then some of the basic topics of Compute, Storage , Networking etc will be familiar to you and List down the topics that you need to review OCI services, pricing model, support etc.
4. Each section has a skill check of 5 questions towards the end, try to answer them based on the theory and concepts shared in the section.
5. Once you complete the topics, go through the sample tests provided in the training.
6. The instructor will solve one sample test along with to showcase how to handle a particular question sharing the tips and tricks to score correctly even for multi-correct answers and how to rule out options.
7. The sample test had a total of 24 questions, I was able to score 21 out of 24 questions correctly in first attempt itself ie 87.5% This made me confident to give the exam right after completing the sample test successfully.
8. Then I went ahead with actual exam where I had minimum of 15 attempts to solve a total of 55 questions. I completed my exam in less than one hour , I had 36mins remaining in hand from a total exam of 90 mins. I was able to pass the exam with flying colours.

Key Focus Areas

The key focus areas for this exam are :-

1. Getting started with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
2. OCI services
3. Security and Compliance
4. Pricing, Support and Operations model

Conclusion

I hope you like my experience of learning and giving the OCI exam that I have summarised in this post. OCI Foundations Associate certification is the fundamental exam in the Oracle Cloud journey and can be cleared very easily with one week of study. If you like this post please share your feedback in the comments.