TL;DR
Prep time: One week
Recommended resources: GitLab University only
Exam difficulty: Both the written and practical exams are easy with proper preparation
Overview
First post in almost nine months! This year has been brutal. I knocked out five certifications last year and took a bit of time at the beginning of this year to take it easy. By take it easy, I mean I built a two-foot tall retaining wall in my backyard so I could rip up the grass on a steep slope, put down seed cloth, cover it with mulch, and plant five trees and over twenty smaller plants. Then, the hottest summer I have ever experienced completely obliterated any motivation I had to start on my 2025 goal of getting five more certifications.
That all recently changed and I am now 20% of the way through that goal, but the rest of this year will be quite busy if I am to make this happen. The GitLab Git Associate certification was one I had on the list for a while. I’ve used GitLab on the job, so some of the concepts were quite simple. The lab portion of the exam was especially easy for me, but even if you have never used Git or GitLab, this is still very, very doable.
Certification Preparation Materials
The GitLab learner dashboard is all you need. The course material is divided into six sections, each covering a major area of function within the platform. There is also a short intro section that goes into the history of version control and explains what makes GitLab unique. You could skip this, but I wouldn’t.
There is also a lab at the end of each section for some hands-on experience. I would highly recommend going through them before signing up for the test.
Timeline
I always take meticulous notes in the form of Google Docs/Google Slides. I spent maybe an hour or two per section carefully going through all of the material. There is no advantage in rushing through the material for a certification, cramming for the exam, and then forgetting almost everything learned soon after passing. Take the time to learn the ins and outs of not just GitLab, but Git. Git is a tool that everyone in tech (not just developers) should know how to use.
This is one that could be knocked out in a weekend. I would recommend spacing it out over a week. Spend a couple hours a day per section and then take the exam at the very end.
The Exam
The exam is not proctored, so feel free to dive right into this once finishing up the course material.
It’s divided into two parts. The first part is a simple multiple choice quiz. Less than twenty questions. Once you get over 80% on it, you can then access a lab environment that they provision for the hands-on portion. Once completing all of the steps, you’ll simply provide them with a link to your project and a grader will check the actions taken for accuracy.
What Next?
The material covered under this certification set us up to go in so many directions. I know that the AWS Certified Developer Associate and the Cisco DevNet Associate exams would have been easier if I had taken this certification first.
Personally, I am jumping into HashiCorp’s Terraform Associate next. Terraform files (.tf) are generally stored and modified in source code repositories. For teams that use Terraform to build their application infrastructure, this usually means storing the files alongside their own source code. If you also want to become a Terraform Certified Associate, maybe take this first if you are not familiar with Git.