Working With Teachers on Certification Prep

One of my favorite lines from a movie and something I can relate to is a scene from the movie 48 Hours, where a character named Luther goes to pick up his car in a parking garage. The attendant looks at the ticket and says, “Wow. Two years.” Luther’s response: “Yeah. I’ve been busy!”

That is how I feel about this blog, given all our major suites (Adobe, CompTIA, and Office) have either been upgraded or are being upgraded since the last time I said hello here. One other suite of certifications has changed, from the Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) suite to the IT Specialist suite, now hosted by Certiport instead of Microsoft.

The changeover happened about a year ago, but the MTA program officially ended on June 30. To that end, many teachers who use our courses are trying to get certified in the IT Specialist certifications in time for the fall. And I have had the privilege of helping some teachers lately, specifically the Hillsborough County schools in Florida, prep for two of these certifications, Device Configuration and Management and HTML/CSS. I liked being in a live environment again, albeit virtual, as that is what I did primarily before joining LearnKey in 2015.

The time I spent with the teachers reminded me of some critical exam points, and I want to share two of them with you today. First, always get a copy of the objectives for any exam and study those well, paying close attention to each objective’s first word or phrase. There is a big difference between “Describe…” and “Configure…” as the latter indeed will have more in-depth questions on an exam.

Secondly, get hands-on practice where you can. For example, for the HTML/CSS exam, build some webpages using HTML and CSS. Make sure you have a code example for each objective on the exam. Make the website your own. Studying something always resonates better when you can make examples of your own.

Lastly, if you can study in a group, great; this way, you and the other group members can research together and bounce concepts off each other. Someone else may better understand an idea than you do and vice versa. We as a group did that by going through some practice exam questions, and the exercises benefited the teachers as they prepped for the exams.

We have some big course releases coming soon, which I will detail in this blog. And I promise not to be like Luther any longer.