Happy Tuesday!
Welcome back to HOW TO // AI. A short bonus issue today, and a personal one: last week I passed the AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam (AIF-C01), on my first try.
I prepared with tools I built myself: my practice app, and a full YouTube playlist I made along the way. So today is half study guide, half show-and-tell: what AWS publishes about the exam, how to study for it, and the tools I used.
Here's what's in today's issue:
🎬 My 30-minute exam guide video, free
📘 What AWS publishes about the exam, in plain English
🧠 How to study for it: test yourself, don't just read
📱 The tools I used, on iPhone and on the web
🎯 Try this today
🎬 Start here: my 30-minute exam guide video
If you're even thinking about AIF-C01, start with my free 30-minute exam guide video. When you want to go deeper, the full playlist is free too.
📘 What AWS publishes about the exam
Everything in this section comes from AWS's public exam guide, not from the exam itself. Like every candidate, I agreed not to share exam content, and I won't.
It's AWS's foundational AI certification, for people who use AI on AWS rather than build it. No coding is required, and AWS pitches it at people with up to six months of exposure to AI on AWS.
The format, straight from AWS's exam guide:
65 questions in 90 minutes. Only 50 count toward your score. The other 15 are unscored, and you won't know which ones they are.
$100, at a Pearson VUE test center or online with a proctor.
Scored from 100 to 1,000, and you need 700. That's for the exam as a whole, so you don't have to pass every section.
No penalty for guessing, so never leave a question blank.
Four question types: multiple choice, multiple response, ordering and matching. On the last three, every part has to be right to get credit.
Valid for three years.
The five domains, by weight:
Applications of Foundation Models: 28%
Fundamentals of Generative AI: 24%
Fundamentals of AI and ML: 20%
Guidelines for Responsible AI: 14%
Security, Compliance, and Governance for AI Solutions: 14%
By AWS's published weights, over half the scored content (52%) is generative AI and foundation models. If your study time is short, spend it there first.
🧠 How to study for it: test yourself, don't just read
Reading about AI feels productive. Testing yourself is what proves you actually know it, and it's what makes it stick. You pick an answer, find out you were wrong, read why, and the idea stays with you in a way an article rarely does. That's not just my opinion; it's one of the most reliable findings in learning research.
Here's the loop the app is built around:
Start with a short quiz before you read anything, so you know where you actually stand.
Drill your weakest domain first, starting with the heaviest ones.
Read every explanation, including the ones for questions you got right. Sometimes you were right for the wrong reason.
Use flashcards in the small gaps of your day: the coffee line, the train, the five minutes before a meeting.
Finish with full timed mocks until you're comfortably above the passing line.
📱 The app I used
All of that lives in HOW TO // AI CERT, the practice app I launched in August. It started as prep for AI certifications, which are still the clearest way to prove what you know to an employer. It's also turned into one of the best ways I know to learn how AI actually works, exam or no exam.
298 original AIF-C01 questions, weighted to the official blueprint, plus a study guide, cheat sheet and timed mocks for the exam.
5,245 practice questions across 15 AI and cloud certifications in all, up from 3,301 across 11 in August. That includes all four of Anthropic's new Claude certifications and the updated AWS Machine Learning Engineer exam (MLA-C02).
Every answer explained in plain English: why the right one is right, and why each wrong one is wrong.
An AI tutor, powered by Claude, for when the explanation isn't enough. Ask a follow-up, ask for an example, or ask it to explain the idea as if you were brand new to it.
Real scenarios, not trivia. Most questions describe a situation (a team building a chatbot, a company keeping its data private) and ask what you would do. That's the part that carries over to your actual work.
Flashcards, timed mock exams, study guides and a readiness score for every exam.
💻 On the web or on your iPhone
Practice in any browser, or get the iPhone app and do a quick ten questions while you wait for your coffee. The app works offline, so a flight or a subway ride counts too.
Every exam has free questions to start, with no account needed on the web. If you want the full question bank, the mock exams and the tutor, one subscription covers all 15 certifications.
🎓 Not taking an exam? Use it to learn anyway
If you want to understand how things like RAG, fine-tuning, agents and guardrails fit together, pick an entry-level certification and work through its free questions:
AWS AI Practitioner to see how the big cloud AI services fit together
Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-901) for building AI apps and agents with Microsoft's tools
CompTIA AI Fundamentals for a foundation that isn't tied to any one vendor. It's a CompTIA course with a built-in assessment rather than a full certification exam, which makes it a gentle place to start.
Each one teaches you the vocabulary of modern AI one scenario at a time. And when you're ready to prove it, the exam questions are written to each vendor's official exam objectives, so the practice lines up with the real thing.
🎯 Try this today: open the free AIF-C01 questions and answer five without looking anything up. Then read every explanation, including the ones for questions you got right. Sometimes you were right for the wrong reason, and that is exactly the gap worth closing. Hit reply and tell me your score. I read every email.
🤔 Got questions?
Which certification are you going after next, and what's standing between you and booking the exam? Email [email protected] and you just might be featured in an upcoming issue!
Stay curious, stick with it, and watch your skills grow week by week!
Until next time :)
-David
P.S. Every question is original, written from the vendors' published objectives. No brain dumps, nothing copied from real exams, and no certification body endorses the app. It is independent, like everything else I make.