AWS Item Writing

Over the last 12 months I have been working on a volunteer project which allows me to give back to the AWS Certification community. For my efforts over the last 12 months Amazon Web Services Training and Certification awarded me with the “Subject Matter Expert - Associate” badge.

“This digital badge validates that this subject matter expert (SME) significantly contributed to the AWS Certification exam program. This SME has volunteered their valuable expertise in at least three Associate-level certification exam development events.”

So what did I do ? Well in post-Covid times we cannot travel as freely as we would have liked. We’ve also proven that remote work is valuable and important. And whilst we cannot travel, life needs to go on. This includes the constant development of our certifications to ensure they are kept fresh and also safe from plagiarism. I won’t go into the latter, but in short it’s important that fresh questions (or items as they are called) are in good supply, in order to rotate older, possibly socialized, questions.

Mid 2021 I was invited to be a Subject Matter Expert (SME) on the AWS Certified Solutions Architect-Associate (SA-A) Exam Program. The goal of the activity was to remotely generate content for the SA-A examination. I was offered to write new content, edit older expiring items and/or participate in group technical reviews.

So how did I qualify for this invite? When you first pass an AWS certification you’ll receive a set of initial benefits, including 50% of your next exam, a free practice exam, access to the certified swag store and also the option to express your interest in joining the SME team.

But that’s not where the selection criteria ends. As I mentioned, it’s an expression of interest. After this AWS has some mysterious internal process which, I can only speculate, involves checking eligibility and experience.

In order to take part in one of these workshops, as an SME, you also have to take an Item Writing course and pass another examination. That’s right, there’s an exam for writing the exams! This course sets out the standards that AWS writes exams to, the process and the understanding of the structure of an actual item. Once you’ve taken this course, understood it all and passed you’ll let AWS know by simple reply of their email and… wait.

Item writing programs are scheduled regularly and are well structured, but generally invites go out 2 - 3 months in advance, so you’ll never know when that next email will come in inviting you to an actual program.

But what did I actually do? Well understandably, a lot of the item writing activities are under NDA. So I must limit myself on what I write here… but one of the perks is bragging rights so here I go!

During the SA-A activities I was involved in writing examination questions based on my own career experience. I was able to be creative and independent in some of the content I wrote. I then, once/twice a week, would join a group session where we’d review items that had previously been written and needed further work to be completed. It’s at this point you get to work with some of the most humbled but great minds in the AWS worlds. This was a great networking opportunity to talk to other like minded people from around the world. In this case I was working with people from Australia, London, France and multiple states within the US.

6 Months later I found myself invited back to another 2 item writing workshop, this time for the AWS Certified SysOps Associate exam (SO-A). This was to be a shorter but more concentrated sprint of 18 hours over 3 dedicated days, each. Once again I was able to freely write questions based on real world scenarios and actual problems faced by our customers.

Many people have said, “exams are based on fake situations”. This cannot be further than the truth. The whole process is driven by team work. Without the many unique and experienced minds across the AWS community, our examinations would not hold the quality and credibility they do today.