How to learn Oracle Cloud and take 3 certifications per month with your ULS

In this article I will give a quick walk-though of the steps you can take to achieve some of the cool Oracle Cloud certifications that are being offered with about 1-2 hours of studies per day and an ULS subscription.

Recently, I've noticed that oracle is offering many new certifications for their cloud PaaS and IaaS offerings. As I see certifications as the best way to learn something new (because I have to study and build labs to pass it), I decided to write this post to show how you can take them without spending so much time.

In Oracle official website, it states "An Oracle Certification helps build a sense of trust with current and future employers that you can perform the job.". I personally don't agree with that. Today there are many, many people using Brain Dumps to bypass certification studies and to try to prove their expertise. Unfortunately, certifications don't have the same value now than it had in the past. Actually, the most brilliant people I know in Oracle Community world don't have a single certification at all.

The reason I take certifications is much more to boost and force my studies in a given product and also to challenge myself. Actually the best way to check someone's capabilities is talking to him. When I do job interviews, for instance, if a guy comes with, let's say, a database OCP in their CV, but don't know how to answer some good questions about RMAN, this is worse for me than a candidate without any certification.

So, going back to the "3 certifications in 1 month" subject, Oracle recently allowed people with an ULS (Unlimited Learning Subscription) to take a certification in the end of the Learning Subscription "for free". So you can get all the required training and the certification exam is included in the end. For free goes in quotes because you have actually to have an ULS subscription, which will cost you something. Many companies that have partnership with Oracle offer this as a benefit to their employees at a much lower or even no cost.

The ULS is divided in "Oracle Unlimited Cloud Learning Subscription" and "Oracle Unlimited Product Learning Subscription". I will only focus here in the Cloud Learning Subscription.

Oracle Unlimited Cloud Learning Subscription

Below are the official numbers without any discounts for United States:

Source: https://education.oracle.com/unlimited-cloud-learning-subscription/ls_ucls

ULS is currently costing $8995 / per user for one year of access (on July-2019). If only PaaS and IaaS are included, this would fall to $4995 and will grant you access to the following learning subscriptions:

Source: https://education.oracle.com/partners-cloud-learning-subscriptions

So, with $ 5k, you would be able to access all the courses and also have access to the following certifications (updated on July-2019):

• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Services
  • 1Z0-932 - Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2018 Architect Associate
  • 1Z0-337 - Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic 2018 Associate Architect
• Application Development Cloud Services
  • 1Z0-926 - Oracle Cloud Platform Application Development 2018 Associate
  • 1Z0-927 - Oracle Cloud Platform Enterprise Mobile 2018 Associate Developer
• Business Analytics Cloud Services
  • 1Z0-1041 - Oracle Cloud Platform Enterprise Analytics 2019 Associate
  • 1Z0-936 - Oracle Cloud Platform Enterprise Analytics 2018 Associate
• Data Management Cloud Services
  • 1Z0-998 - Oracle Database Cloud Service 2019
  • 1Z0-950 - Oracle Cloud Platform Data Management 2018 Associate
  • 1Z0-928 - Oracle Cloud Platform Big Data Management 2018 Associate
  • 1Z0-320 - MySQL Cloud Service 2018 Implementation Essentials
  • 1Z0-160 - Oracle Database Cloud Service
  • Oracle Data Management Cloud 2019 Implementation Essentials (Coming Soon)
• Integration Cloud Services
  • 1Z0-1042 - Oracle Cloud Platform Application Integration 2019 Associate
  • 1Z0-934 - Oracle Cloud Platform Application Integration 2018 Associate
  • 1Z0-935 - Oracle Cloud Platform Data Integration 2018 Associate
• Oracle Management Cloud Services Learning Subscription
  • 1Z0-930: Oracle Cloud Platform Systems Management 2018 Associate
• Oracle Cloud Security Learning Subscription
  • 1Z0-933 - Oracle Cloud Platform Identity and Security Management 2018 Associate
• Autonomous Database Cloud Services
  • 1Z0-931 - Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud 2019 Specialist
• Content and Experience Cloud Services
  • 1Z0-1040 - Oracle Cloud Platform Content and Experience 2019 Associate
  • 1Z0-937 - Oracle Cloud Platform Content and Experience 2018 Associate

If you check the cost of each certification in US it's around $245 / per exam. The training are much more expensive, if you check a single ToD (training on demand) price, it's not less than $2k. So, you can take 20 certifications plus hundreds of courses for $416 per month (the price is not even 2 standalone certifications if done separately).

After you active your ULS subscription, you can go into each Learning Subscription subject (links are above) and filter by "Certification". Below is an example for the Oracle Cloud Security Learning Subscription (my favorite one):

Once you open the Learning Path, it will show you all the courses. For this example, it's a 10h learning path:

As I watch the videos at 1.5x speed, this falls to 6 hours. So, basically, I did this learning path in 6 days studying about 1-2 hours a day, and it gave me a very good knowledge about products that I didn't even know that existed. After the training, I've requested a trial account to play a bit.

The certification exam becomes available in the end:

Once you click on the exam, it will redirect you to the pearson vue website and will automatically apply a discount code:

After I choose my exam location, dates and everything else:

And that's how I'm preparing for the "1Z0-933 - Oracle Cloud Platform Identity and Security Management 2018 Associate", the first of many in my pipeline =]

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