Failing the Same Way Twice

I failed two certification exams in July.

The first was AZ-700, three weeks ago. I knew I was not prepared. I sat it anyway, hoping the tide would turn. It did not. What I said to myself afterwards was that this was my fault and I just had to take responsibility.

I meant it. Then I did the same thing again.

Last Friday I sat the AWS Security Specialty. I started preparing on the Tuesday. Three days. I had not taken a single practice exam before that week, and the material I opened with was written for the previous version of the exam.

That one has a story attached. My session was cut short by a network interruption at question 61 of 65, with more than twenty minutes still on the clock. The questions I never reached were scored as wrong. I finished on 691 against a pass mark of 750.

The interruption is real and I have raised it. It is also not the explanation. My score report flagged four of six domains as needing improvement. That is sixty eight percent of the scored exam. Four unanswered questions do not produce that. If the connection had held, I would have failed by less.

So the honest account is not that I had bad luck on Friday. It is that I got a warning three weeks earlier, agreed with it out loud, and changed nothing.

Here is what was actually going on.

I had four certification tracks running at once, alongside a migration programme at work, a product build, a community, and a writing habit. I had been told in July that four at a time was unworkable and that I should sequence them. I agreed. Then I kept booking.

The less comfortable thing I noticed is that I have become reactive. I used to jump at things. Now emails arrive through the day and my attention follows whatever the last one pointed at. Project management work will do that to you if you let it. Study time was the first thing that quietly stopped happening, and I did not notice, because the days still felt full.

Failing once and calling it a lesson is easy. It costs nothing and it makes a decent post. Failing the same way twice is the part that actually taught me something, because the first failure came with a diagnosis I had already written down and did not act on.

I am not going to announce a date and a plan here. Announcing plans is part of how I got here. What I will say is what has changed. One certification at a time. The diagnostic before I book, not three days after. And the first hour of the day belongs to me before anything else can claim it.

I passed a Google Cloud security exam in June after four days of study, and I wrote about it, and that post did well. This one will not. I thought about not writing it. That is exactly why I am writing it.

If you have told yourself you will be ready by the date, and you know you will not be, move the date. It costs less than I paid.