The Renewal Assessment

The renewal assessment is accessed through Microsoft Learn and, unlike the original certification exam you had to pass to gain certification, is not proctored. You can take it anywhere you have an internet connection and browser.

• This places an element of trust on you to be honest and take the assessment in good faith – do not abuse that trust.
• The assessment itself takes no longer than 45 minutes, and is similar to the non-lab question formats in the exam itself.
• Their focus is on areas within the exam scope (Skills Measured) that have changed since you passed the exam, which makes sense in terms of ensuring the continued value of the certification in attesting to your knowledge in the areas covered by it.
• The assessment is still timed, but it does feel slightly more leisurely than the full blown exam did.
• As Microsoft state themselves, you can try the assessment as many times as you like until either you pass or your certification expires.
• You can retry again on the same day as your first try but thereafter only once every 24 hours.
• This gives you potentially 181 attempts, which is pretty generous!
• This does lead itself to a couple of strategies you could adopt, which I’ll cover later in this post.

AZ500 Renewal

I decided to dive straight into the assessment to see how I got on, partly because this was my first ever renewal, so I had no idea what to expect.

I found it reasonably straightforward, passing the assessment on my first attempt, and found most questions were not too challenging but this is mostly likely a combination of a couple of factors:

• Unlike the exam, you’re not coming in as cold to the topics.
• If you’ve been able to work with the technologies involved you have probably had experience with the things that are new or have changed since you sat the exam.
• If you are (like me) keeping an eye on the updates from Microsoft then you will at least be aware of what’s new/changed even if you haven’t had hands-on time with it.

SC300 Renewal

I had found this certification harder than AZ500 – something you might be surprised by since I passed SC300 first time whereas I needed two attempts at AZ500.

I needed three attempts at this renewal unlike the AZ500.

In truth I think there are two reasons for that:

• There had been more changes in the areas covered by SC300 (Microsoft Entra and the whole identity landscape including Microsoft 365) than AZ500.
• AZ500 is something that if you’ve been working in an Enterprise IT infrastructure for a long time, you can pretty much get halfway to the answers based on that experience. SC300 is a little less intuitive in some ways and has a lot more you need to know around specifics of policies and licensing across Azure and Microsoft 365.
• Between first attempt and passing the SC300 renewal, I went through the Learn modules and revised on what had changed since I passed the exam and that made a world of difference for me personally.

In this post, I’m going to talk about my first-ever Microsoft certification renewal experience.