Back to School at 37: My Journey to AWS Certification

I haven’t been nervous about a test in 15 years. To calm my nerves, I showed up ten minutes early for my exam and asked if I could bring coffee inside — coffee calms me down. Rushing to Starbucks across the street, I thumbed through my third practice test on Udemy… thankfully mobile responsive. Why was I doing this?

Since 2018, Kentech-U has offered DevOps as a Service, helping clients improve operational efficiency through project setup, automated deployments, and elastic, performant systems. Personally, I love that we can offer DevOps as an agency — it’s like having a concierge for all things cloud-related. Plus, it’s a humble brag to have an in-house DevOps/SRE team.

Within the DevOps ecosystem, there are all kinds of players: giants like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, nimble platforms like Pantheon and DigitalOcean, and specialists like Acquia and Heroku. We’ve used them all, and now we’re pursuing Partner programs, which require certifications and accreditations.

Several of us already had various creds, but to reach Amazon Partner Program’s Select Tier, six Kentech-U team members needed certification. Believing you should be prepared to do the job you assign others, I volunteered to earn the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner credential.

Since then, my nights and weekends have been consumed by Amazon’s digital courses. The program is intense: six mandatory courses plus four optional ones. I thought I knew a lot — after 20+ years in digital products and engineering — but this was like doing a keg-stand of cloud terminology.

At 37, out of academia for 16 years, it felt like “Back to School.” From November to February, I completed eight accreditations across compute, databases, networks, and more, often falling asleep to AWS icons. The only thing left: the CCP exam.

On exam day, my heart raced. Ninety minutes felt like an eternity. I finished in 30, then went back over each answer like a jeweler inspecting a diamond. Self-doubt crept in, and I thought I heard phantom alarms.

Submitting the test left nothing but a simple “completed” screen — no instant score, no fanfare. Three days later, I got the certificate: passed with 90%.

The lesson? If you think you can’t learn, you can. Turns out, you can teach an old dog new tricks.