How I studied for the 70-762 exam

Back in March I created a spreadsheet to help me track my studying for the 70-762 Developing SQL Databases exam and posted about some of my resources. I plan on taking the 70-762 on Monday, 2018-07-23. I wanted to share my experiences studying for the exam prior to taking it and the methodology to my studying. After the test on Monday I plan on posting about how my exam went (within the rules of the NDA) and I plan on making a few posts later about why and who should become certified. Continue reading “How I studied for the 70-762 exam”

My study guide to the 70-762: Developing SQL Databases

I couldn’t find a spreadsheet that would help track the topics, ETA, and other notes online, so I decided to compile all of my resources into a singular spreadsheet to help me keep track of studying and to help the community for those taking the 70-762. You can copy / make a copy of this and track yourself.

Spreadsheet here!

The tab Topic Resources has been taken from Daniel Calbimonte and his post on MSSQLTips. Huge thanks to him for taking the time to compile all of those resources on those topics!

In the Additional Resources, I’ve listed out links to things I thought are incredibly beneficial to my studying of the 70-762. This also lists out a Time to Study table where you can average how many hours of studying you plan to do on certain days of the week and then it gives you an estimate of the hours necessary to study based on what you estimate each topic will take you to learn. I’ve already filled in the hours for an estimated optimistic and pessimistic goal, as you fill in the actual hours worked you’ll notice it will adjust for actual time spent instead of only estimated time.

The Topic and Hours page lists out the topics as per the test page from Microsoft and breaks it out into a table that you can track hours you spend in each topic. This gives you a manageable approach to figuring out how much time this will take you to complete. I’ve filled in my own estimate of the optimistic and pessimistic guidelines, so feel free to adjust this as you need to match your own knowledge. I figured I would want at least 30 minutes to a hour on each topic even if it’s a brief overview just to refresh myself.

The last page is the planner. This is where I keep track of the date I studied, the high / mid / detail level topics I worked on, the amount of time I worked on it, and there are two extra fields. One for notes if there is something I need to come back to or perhaps I found some additional resources I want to touch base on later. And then there’s the Other Topic column. I’m still reading through the Internal Pros book, so when I log time it’s specific to reading that book rather than any of the categories I’ve listed. I decided when I begin working on the 70-762 study guide I’ll begin filling in time on the topics and making sure I understand the topics to meet the detailed level of the topics listed by Microsoft. This will make for an interesting PowerBI graph later to see how my time was spent studying. Maybe I can use that data to study more efficiently for 70-767!

Happy studying and see you on the other side!