Renewing an AWS Certification Without Sitting the Exam

On August 9th I renewed AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional without booking an exam. It took an evening of labs on AWS Skill Builder, and the expiration date moved out a year.

This is new. AWS announced the option on June 23rd of this year and it is still in open beta. If you hold one of the certifications it covers and it is coming up on expiration, it is worth knowing about before you schedule a seat at a testing center.

What it actually is

AWS calls it Maintain. Instead of retaking your exam, you complete curated digital courses and hands-on labs on Skill Builder and accumulate points. Hit the threshold and your certification extends by one year from the date you finish.

The thresholds depend on level. Associate certifications need 500 points including at least one practical activity. Professional certifications need 700 points including at least two. The practical activities are the ones where you build, configure, and troubleshoot in live AWS environments rather than watch a video.

You become eligible when your certification is within 90 days of expiring. Before that window the option is not there. In Skill Builder it lives under Explore, then Validate your skills, then Recertify.

You need a Skill Builder subscription, but don’t need to pay for an exam.

The associate came along with it

The rule I have relied on for years is that passing a Professional exam recertifies your Associate and Foundational certifications. I wrote about leaning on that to keep seventeen certifications manageable.

That behavior carried over here. Finishing the 700 points for Solutions Architect – Professional also moved Solutions Architect – Associate out a year. I did not complete a second track for it.

That is what makes it a better deal than it first looks. One evening of labs renewed two certifications, and the Skill Builder subscription covers as many as you are eligible to maintain. There is no per certification fee the way there is with exams. If you hold a Professional with Associates underneath it, one subscription does the work of several exam sittings.

One year, not three

Here is the tradeoff. Passing the exam gives you three years. Maintain gives you one.

So this is not a way out of the treadmill. It is a way to defer it, and if you use it every year you are doing an evening of labs annually instead of one exam every three years. Whether that is a better deal depends on what you get out of exams.

For me the exam is the worse experience by a wide margin, and not because it is hard. It is a half day gone, plus travel to a testing center, plus the specific dread of the proctoring software. The labs I would arguably have done anyway. Trading that for a shorter renewal window is fine.

There is one thing exams still do better. Sitting a current version of an exam forces you across the whole blueprint, including the services you avoid. The curated training is narrower by design. If you have been running the same three workload patterns for two years, the exam will find the gaps and the training probably will not.

Summary

Maintain is a good choice when you are pressed for time, or when you simply are not up for the full exam right now. It costs an evening instead of a half day and a testing appointment, and it buys you a year to decide whether you want to sit the exam properly.

If you are working on something on AWS and want another set of eyes on it, please reach out.