Last week I passed Azure AZ-700 networking exam “Designing and Implementing Microsoft Azure Networking Solutions” and earned the ”Azure Network Engineer Associate” certification. My score was just above the passing level, which was 700 points, so I was very glad to make it through. The exam felt unpleasant in several ways and I want to share some notes about it here.
My background is that I had zero experience with Azure. I did Azure Fundamentals cert AZ-900 recently but it was only a slight overview of concepts and services used in Azure. AZ-900 exam was easy but AZ-700 was tough.
It’s always difficult to match the exam blueprint to corresponding learning resources. For me, it’s optimizing time and outcomes. I’ve done lots of Cisco and Juniper certs over the years and I have found vendor materials to be the best match for the vendor exam. I started preparation by reading through self-paced Microsoft Learning modules found on the exam page for free. I think the content was quite good and easily consumable, although some repetition and inconsistency. Also, the way modules are organized on Microsoft Learning page is quite fuzzy. But if you just follow the path, it will guide you through. I made my own notes during the learning to be able to quickly recap them later.
After learning all modules and recapping them one time, I had so many questions about how things in Azure really work and should be done. Then I took the practice exam on Microsoft exam page and it opened a totally new view to topics. The practice exam was excellent because it had similar questions to the actual exam and after reviewing answers all options were explained shortly. It helped a lot to understand more. I was confused because the practice exam didn’t correlate much with the learning modules’ content.
I had still many questions in mind and tried to watch John Savill’s study videos. They are great to understand Azure but not that great to resolve exam questions. I found the videos quite rambling and they are not that good resource for optimizing learning time and outcomes. Finally, I reviewed the practice exam two times and also recapped my notes last time. It took about 4 intensive learning weeks to adopt all. After that, I thought I’m ready, although I still felt quite uncertain. But there’s a point when you can’t learn more with current resources and you just have to take the exam. So I did.
I selected the VUE online exam like I have done many times over the last three years. The exam had 40 questions in 1 hour and 40 minutes. The first part was the scenario which had 8 questions based on the description, documentation, and requirements. This section was locked after answering and you couldn’t review it later as you could with normal questions. After that, there were 32 normal questions, except in the end again appeared 3 case study questions which were also locked after immediately answering. The totally strange and unnecessarily complicated ending! After answering all 40 questions, you could review the remaining 29 unlocked questions. I had about 10 minutes left to review about ten questions I had marked to check again. So time was scarce, but just enough to think and answer properly. I think questions were evenly about all topics and there was nothing to complain about.
Then the exam experience: I have two things to nag about. The scenario-based question set at the start was crappy. Source information and question were hidden in the left pane tabs and you had to collect all details from the different tabs one by one. So it was a lot of tab-switching and collecting fragmented information in your mind. I felt that it was the purpose to make the scenario look hard and difficult to understand, although it necessarily wasn’t. I would have needed pen and paper to put things together and form a whole picture, but it wasn’t possible in an online exam.
The second complaint is about the content of the questions. I thought I was well prepared with Mircosoft’s official resources, but it wasn’t enough. Over half of the questions were a bit unclear to me. I had a clue what was the point, but I wasn’t sure which answer to choose and I had to guess the best option. The reason for this is that many questions were so detailed that knowing it exactly felt impossible. Well, that happens in other vendors’ exams too, but not to that extent. It could be also that I’m a newbie with Azure that I couldn’t adopt all information at once so quickly. I was prepared for more fundamental-style questions, but the reality was in details. That reflects the whole Azure networking world, which is full of details, limitations, and caveats you must know.
For that reason, calling this certification Associate-level is wrong. In my opinion, it should be at least Specialist-level. But Microsoft has no networking certification path and levels to climb. AZ-700 is the only networking exam and that’s a shame because Azure is “the enterprise cloud” where hybrid networking and porting legacy networks into the cloud should be valuable skills.