Somewhere along the line I decided that I should pass the certification test for the software that I was working with in my former employed life.
It'll give me something to put on my resume. On the face of things it shouldn't be a problem as I've worked with this software for a long time. Many of my performance review goals revolved around becoming competent in the advanced features and until yesterday I thought I had met those goals.
That was, until yesterday!
I've been working with the certification materials going through each chapter of the book, doing the questions at the end of the chapter. As I went through each chapter I was doing pretty well. By the end of the book, which I covered in about a week I had answered more than 90% of the questions correctly.
Pleased that everything was going so well I signed up for the test at the test site. My certification kit came with access to a practice test, so I signed on to take that. The practice test shook my confidence!
All the questions are multiple choice, but many of them require a little work on a scratch pad. Instead of looking at the book and looking at the notepad you have to move your focus from monitor to notepad. You can't put little check marks next to the wrong questions to help you eliminate answers when they're on a monitor.
Add the change in media to questions about esoteric items, some that I hadn't reviewed for almost a week, and it was a disaster. I'm not going to embarrass myself by reporting the score to the blogosphere, but it was not pretty. This is stuff I'm supposed to know! I nearly had a panic attack while taking the test. I knew before it was done that I had a problem.
So what did I do? The first thing I did was reschedule the real test. If you fail you can't take it again for two months and that will scramble my job search since I want to be looking seriously by the end of the summer. In the past being anxious about something like this would have cemented me into eliminating it by mumbling a "Hail Mary" and charging ahead with the test on the scheduled data. I'm going to live with the anxiety a little longer and see if I can't use it to my advantage. I have a strong stomach.
I printed off the practice test, sacrificing 36 pages, and am going through it looking at my mistakes. At first glance I can see that I'd have passed the test if I'd spent a few more seconds reading the questions carefully. There are several areas that I need to review more thoroughly as well.
I'm going to use the CD that came with the book more, and run through examples to some of the areas I'm less familiar with so the answers to those questions aren't just rote memory. My son left a big stack of blank index cards in his room, I know what I can do with those.
I'll also re-take the tests in the book with a timer running and will work out a system where I use the notepad in a way that's more like I will during the real test.
I'm not a happy camper. Are you a good test taker? Got any rabbit-foot tricks for me?
