Background
I work with big data for a living and enjoy tinkering with a homelab. I do believe that homelabbing as a hobby was super helpful for understanding a few items from the exam. I also completed the Digital Leader and ACE exams before taking the PCA. I found that taking exams in that order was really helpful for creating a good foundation for the PCA.
Study Method
I took a lot of mock exams from a few different courses, I don't have an exam or course I'd recommend. Just pick one course that looks good to you and stick with it. I would suggest doing as many mock exam questions as you can. For me, this was about 20 questions a day, maybe less if I needed to focus on learning a new topic. After every question, review what you got wrong and explore any new key terms or topics of interest. Researching random topics helps to keep the studying from becoming boring and also helps your overall knowledge grow. Take notes on keywords and anything of interest that catches your eye.
All my notes eventually became a Web App that I personalized for my own tastes with the help of Claude Code. I focused a lot on terminology and word association. For example if you see "global" and "relational" then you should start thinking "Spanner" is a likely answer choice. I also needed visuals for networking and security so I included a section for these as well. To be clear, the web app does not contain any mock exam study questions and is not an exam dump. It's a quick reference guide that worked well for my study methods.
Observations
Maybe I got lucky with my exam version but the case studies on my exam didn't require any prior knowledge or reading of the case studies. I did review them a few times while studying but nothing was memorized. During the exam I found that the questions held all the information needed to pick the correct answer.
Exam Advice
- In options for the exam, on the left side of the screen enable both "notepad" and "strikeout." It's super helpful being able to remove answer choices that you know are not the correct answer. I minimized the notepad to only hold a few words. Any keyword in the question I thought useful I wrote down. I then used this as a main reference to selecting answer choices instead of rereading the question multiple times.
- Keep an eye on the clock, and keep questions to a time limit, if you're over time (like 1.5 minutes per question) then flag the question and move on.
- Flag any question you don't understand, but select an answer choice and strikeout any answer you know are not the answer before moving on. Use the notepad to leave a quick note to yourself to quickly say what this question is asking for. If you have time at the end of the exam then come back to the flagged questions.