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Certifications - How to renew Miorcosoft certifications for 12 months

To maintain the validity of Microsoft certifications, it's necessary to complete a renewal assessment every 12 months. What's this process like? This post summarises the process that I followed when I recently completed this task.

If you're looking to renew your Microsoft certifications, here's an overview of how the overall process looked like, and the difficulty of the assessment when I recently renewed my Power Platform Developer Associate certification.

How to start the Microsoft certification renewal process

Several months prior to the expiry of the certification, I received several email reminders from Microsoft. These contained links and prompts to log into the Microsoft Learn website. From the Learn website, the certification area provided full instructions, as shown here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/certifications/power-platform-developer-associate/renew/


The details on this page summarise the skills that are measured in the assessment. The purpose of the renewal process is to ensure that those with certifications remain up-to-date.

From this page, I could identify the topic areas that were new, compared to when I initially took the certification exams. These topics included "integrating Dataverse Azure Solutions", and "Extending Power Apps Portals".

A great resource on this page is a customised learning syllabus that includes the relevant modules from Microsoft Learn.

How to prepare for a Microsoft Certification Renewal Assessment

To prepare for the renewal assessment, I worked through the resources that were highlighted in Microsoft Learn. This was the only preparation that I did, in addition to a small amount of additional reading. In total, I spent around 4 hours over a couple of days.

What's the assessment process like?

To assessment takes place online and there's a link on the renewal page of the website to begin the assessment. My assessment included 24 questions and the allocated time was 45 minutes.

Unlike the original proctored exams at the test centre, there was no way to review or to amend/go back to questions that I already answered. All the questions were multichoice and very similar to the layout of the questions that appear at the end of the Microsoft learn modules.

After answering all the questions, I was able to see the result. A useful thing is that it produced a report that highlighted how well I did in each section. This would have helpful if I had needed to retake the assessment.


Conclusion

I found the certification renewal process to be straightforward. With a little bit of preparation. it was no more difficult than taking a quiz. For topic areas that were more complex, the multi-choice nature of the questions made it simple to make educated guesses.

If you need to renew a certification, I would recommend doing it early. It isn't difficult and it's possible to retake the assessments multiple times without charge if you don't pass. Therefore, even without any preparation, it's possible to just take the assessment as a learning exercise.
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