Introduction

About two years ago I made myself a promise to obtain following certifications AZ-900, MS-900, SC-900, OSCP, AZ-500, AZ-104, AZ-305, and MS-102 to increase my knowledge about cloud technologies and cyber security. I’m happy to inform that I successfully passed the Microsoft 365 Administrator Expert certification on 3 September 2024.

In this article, I decided to go through the process I took to obtain the Microsoft 365 Administrator Expert (MS-102) certification to hopefully help other people out with their journey to obtain the certification.

Preparation

As always I recommend going through the Microsoft Learn: MS-102 course modules since it contains a lot of information's about Microsoft 365 which you can't obtain through other sites and videos. While going through the course modules I highly recommend going through your own Microsoft 365 environment as it will help you understand Microsoft 365 much better.

Usually, after finishing course modules I tend to go through my notes to try to improve them as it will help me re-call information's which I might have forgotten. I recommend others to do it too since it will help you understand topics much better.

While going through the notes I try to ask myself the following questions to understand feature or service much better.

• What does the feature or service do?
• Why is the feature or service important?
• When will the feature or service come in good use?

If the topic includes using multiple of services and features I try to create a mermaid graph to combine these features and services together to understand the way they work and functions together.

Exam

At 3 of September, I was studying for MS-102 certification for few hours, and I randomly decided to book the exam and saw that an spot was available within 30 minutes so I quickly purchased it and joined the exam. Once I was in the exam I ended up panicking a bit since I saw I had to answer 68 questions within 140 minutes. Here's a overview of my experience with the exam:

• Case studies were the most simple part of the exam
• Multiple of choices were fairly challenging but I managed to finish them all off
• Non-skippable multiple of choices questions were difficult since it didn't contain enough of information to answer the questions

Once I was finished with all the questions and case study I delivered in the exam and saw a passing score of 820 points 🥳. I felt huge relief after passing the certification and became empty inside since I accomplish-ed all the goals that I set for myself for two years ago and started wondering what I should do next...

Conclusion

The Microsoft 365 Administrator Expert (MS-102) certification is great for IT professionals who spends decent amount of time working in Microsoft 365 environment as it will help you understand the different panels, services, and features that comes with Microsoft 365. It can also help IT professionals who are not familiar with Microsoft 365 to better understand their environment.