Microsoft 365 Fundamentals Exam - Reflections on studying and pasing the exam
Yesterday I sat my first remote Microsoft exam. This is my first Microsoft certification; perhaps a little odd as I have an 18+ year career now.
The exam itself was pretty easy and I only studied for about a week for it. I’d say that I was able to rest a lot on my experience.
Study Materials
My study resources were as follows:
- Microsoft Learn skills measured & learning paths - Microsoft 365 Certified: Fundamentals learning paths
- This should be your starting point. Pay attention to the skills outline as you will often find keywords and constraints. eg. the skills outline often used the word “describe”. This is important as you don’t need to be able to do the task, only understand what it is.
- Guide To Cloud channel (by Susanth Sutheesh) on YouTube has a series on MS-900 training .
- This was useful for getting the content in another form, rather than just relying on reading. There were a few concepts in this series that I realised I didn’t know, which led to research in the MS Learn content above or staight from the docs.
- John Savill’s MS-900 Microsoft 365 Fundamentals Exam Cram and Overview was a useful final resource.
- He covers the entire exam in about 75 mins and was good as a review resource. Once again I found myself scurrying back to the docs to clear up things I didn’t know.
Taking the exam
This was a good learning experience for taking remote exams. Here’s a few takeaways from the experience:
- make sure your desk is absolutely clear. The proctor cared a lot about this.
- the proctor was fine with my kid’s artwork on the walls
- the proctor was also fine with the stuff laying around the room, however
- the proctor asked me to remove the bag under my desk. The desktop computer case under there was fine though.
- DON’T MOUTH THE QUESTIONS!!! I got warned once…
- The facial detection struggled
- I wear glasses all the time. You can see a video of yourself while taking the test. I could see glare from the computer screen in my glasses. Periodically (too frequently actually), I was interrupted by the facial recognition software stating that it couldn’t detect my face and I had 5 mins to fix it or else… I quickly found that taking my glasses off helped the recognition software helped matters. It was annoying but I got used to the interruptions.
- I also looked a quite dark. This couldn’t have helped… For my next exam, I’ll turn on a desk lamp and try bouncing it off the wall behind my monitor to cast some diffused light on my face.
Final thoughts
While basic (for me), it was a worthwhile exam. I fell short in the section on Licensing and Support (67%), though excellent results in the other sections made up for it.
The real value was two-fold:
- it was good for familiarising myself with the remote test taking experience.
- it gives me some grounding in the overall Microsoft 365 platform, which will help me have intelligent conversations with admins.