I love certification not only Microsoft ones but others as well. But my friends often ask me why I take exam because most of them think certifications are useless. Well, I can understand why they feel in that way, but this is how I use exam to learn more.

As a learning catalog

I don't know everything, of course, thus what I do search or learn are limited to what I know or what I am interested in right now. To broaden my skill and knowledge, I need someone or something tells me which technologies or products are available to learn. That's why I go to MCP exam list to see which exams are available, that gives me options to learn new things.

As a learning guideline

When I decide which service or product to learn, then I need someone tells me where to start.

• Most exam gives me skill measured section, where I can see terminologies or knowledge I should know.
• I can follow the section to learn the service or products one by one.

As a real scenario

After I completed my learning, and hands-on, I yet need real experience and need to know the scenario.

• Each exam gives us around 30-100 questions
• Some exam gives case study base which is great way to test the knowledge

I know that some people say exam questions don't make sense. However, exam quality is actually getting better and better. You can also give feedback if you will.

IT pro exams?

I am a developer, yet I take IT Pro exams. Why?

• Because I can learn the things from the other direction. For example, I can learn design pattern of the service or product by knowing what features the product has.
• I can see what challenge IT pro guys have so that I can work better with them. And now DevOps time, so I need to know IT pro things anyway :)

Okay, that's it. Because I learn new things to improve myself, I never study to pass the exam, thus I often fail. Which is actually good as I have another chance to learn deeper :)

Resources

Followings are resources I usually use.
Microsoft Virtual Academy (Free)
Channel 9 (Free)
Pluralsight (Not Free)

Hope you share how you learn new things as well!

Ken