To become a Microsoft certified Azure Data Science Associate you need to pass the DP-100 exam. For preparing you can either take a course led by a Microsoft-certified coach or prepare by yourself and study online.

I took the course over the ESI (Enterprise Skills Initiative) of Microsoft. Courses over the ESI are only available for companies and hence, you would have to request it from your employer. Most of these courses cost around 1800$ and as a private person, I would rather suggest just take the online modules offered from Microsoft or take an online course on udemy or other pages for which the prices are pretty low (starting with 19.99$). Further down, in the section “Online resources for self-study,” you can also find what I would suggest to you.

Structure

• The ESI workshop (people-led workshop)
• Online resources for self-study
• How to pass the exam
• How the exam went

The ESI workshop

The ESI course that I took was lead by an ESI certified trainer and was scheduled for 3 days (each day from 9am to 5pm). It consisted of a theoretical part where the instructor taught us what we later on used in the practical part. The schedule for the three days looked like this:

On the first day, we covered Module 0–3, on day 2 we did Module 4–6, and on day 3 Module 7–10. Condensed the workshop could also have been held on only 2 days. Since the coach grants you for every module more than enough time we finished on each day 1–3 hours earlier than 5 pm. After each theoretical session, we had enough time to do the practical part in the Microsoft Lab and the trainer was available for questions if necessary. The Microsoft Lab runs in a virtual machine and will guide you step by step through each module and task. After each step, you have to set a hook and click after each page on the next bottom.

Screenshot of my lab session.

**Resume: **In total, the workshop is okay, but for 1800$ not necessary. You can actually find all resources online. For the ESI course, we used the GitHub repo https://github.com/MicrosoftLearning/mslearn-dp100 and ran through all the notebooks which you can find there. At the beginning of the course, the main components of the Azure ML Studio were explained.

Online resources for self-study

For the exam, you will be asked some theoretical questions with multiple-choice questions, but also some more practical questions that will check your code understanding. For this part, but also for your further progress in machine learning, I would recommend that you make use of the following tips. After my experience, I must say that the ESI course and also other courses like the ones on udemy etc. are not necessary to pass the exam. To learn the relevant basics to work with Azure ML and to pass the exam, I will list below the resources I recommend to you.

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