Decode your own IT or cloud certification
Vendor certification exams aren’t one shape but a family, and you work out each one from a document the vendor itself publishes: an exam guide. That guide names the domains the exam covers and roughly how much weight each carries, playing the role a syllabus plays for a school exam, so your study time follows its weights rather than a course’s chapter order.
Most of these exams are scenario-based multiple-choice and multiple-response items, worked at pace against a published time limit — read the scenario, pick the response the guide’s domains point you to, and move on. What a wrong pick costs you, whether some items are unscored trial questions, and what counts as passing are all vendor-specific; find them in the box below, per exam code.
A vendor revises its own guide and retires exam versions on its own schedule, so if you prepare from an old guide, or from a practice bank built for a retired version, you’re preparing against a paper that no longer exists.
Run a focused few-week campaign against the current guide open in front of you, never against a bank of questions taken as the syllabus. Read the exact exam code’s current guide before you start; its numbers are in the box below.
Find the current exam guide for the certification you are sitting. Pick its highest-weighted domain and work three scenario items from a practice source, choosing the response the guide’s own wording points to. Then check the domain weight against how much of your study time that domain has actually had.
A practice-question bank from a course or forum feels faster than reading a long vendor guide first.
A bank built for an earlier version of the exam is not preparing you for the current one — a vendor can retire a version and shift its domains without much notice. The guide alone states the current domains, their weights and the exact exam code’s scope, so reading it first is what makes every later practice question actually count toward this exam rather than a retired one.
IT and cloud certifications: check the current notice
As read on 14 September 2026, unevenly, across five vendors’ own sites: the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam guide read in full, and a Microsoft Learn page read in part. Google Cloud, Cisco and CompTIA pages were reached but not read as full exam guides. The box holds only what each guide confirmed. Confirm in the current notice, for your exact vendor and exam code: the current domain weights, question count and time limit, and whether unscored items are included. Also confirm the passing-score method and the exam’s retirement date.