HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
October 2020
On 19 October 2020, I passed the HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate exam, and am now a HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate.
I did not find this exam too difficult as I had been using Terraform quite a bit at this point, both at work and outside of work (The infrastructure for this website was deployed using Terraform). I did however complete a training course by Zeal Vora on Udemy to ensure any gaps were covered. I ended up not needing much of the content of the course, but it was good to cover everything that the exam is looking for. The major gap I had was specifically relating to Terraform Cloud, as we do not use this at work.
The main issues I had with the exam was related to PSI being the only exam vendor, and not having the option to do the exam in person. Throughout the exam, I was disconnected twice due to ‘network issues’ and given that I was able to immediately reconnect I am skeptical that this was caused by my internet connection. This was very disruptive to the exam as each time it dropped I had to wait for a proctor to go through the verification process with PSI again.
Overall this was an extremely bad experience, I think I passed the exam within 20-30 minutes of actual exam time, but the exam overall took over 60-90 minutes due to the disruptions. If I had the option I would have done this in person to ensure that the issues I faced were not a factor. Had I been less confident in the material this could have easily thrown me off the mental exam preparation.
During my study/research I found an article on Medium.com by ‘ravadonis’ that covers many of the available resources to learn Terraform and study for this exam, I would recommend anyone looking to do this with no prior experience to start by reading the article.