I’m pleased to say that I recently passed DP-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals. If you’ve come to this post via the home page then you’ll see that I recently passed DP-200 and DP-201 to achieve the Certified Data Engineer certification and as I had a discount voucher with 50% off an exam I decided to do another fundamentals exam.

Although my employer hadn’t asked, I decided to go for the set as a qualification for the Microsoft Partner Data Platform Competency. It appears that Microsoft are shifting away from the technical assessments that were delivered through partner university. This makes a bit of sense now that there are obvious public certifications available and while being a little more difficult, the fundamentals is more of a useful achievement.

From a personal milestone this is my 40th Microsoft Exam pass; way back before OneNote was a thing I started an exam ritual of creating a folder for the next exam I was targeting. In the small development company that was the first Microsoft Partner I worked at we used presentation binders for training packs – basically a ring binder with pockets in the front and spine for labelling. I would go through the ritual of creating a front cover for the binder, with my name, exam and “volume” number. I still go through this exercise and they have slowly counted up over the last year and a bit. Now my “exam process” tends to focus around OneNote but I still have a set of pipeline folders which have files related to an exam prep.

Microsoft Certification as a thing has ebbed and flowed through the years. Like a lot of things early in my career I just simply something because my employer asked me to. They wanted to get Microsoft Gold Partner and needed employees who had certifications. Thus started my journey with my first exam pass on April 19th 1996 which at the time of me writing this post is 25 years ago. That was also just under a year before I got married, so my long suffering wife has been with me for my entire certification journey!