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I have recently passed Sitecore Experience Commerce (SXC) 9 Essentials Certification.

As I have already prepared some learning resources that can help you get up to speed with Sitecore Commerce 9, I thought that it would be great to prepare also some study guide specifically for anybody who is preparing for the Sitecore Experience Commerce (SXC) 9 Essentials Certification and want to pass it without stress 🙂

Before we start: You won’t find here any information on what to focus on or sample questions. Also please do not contact me to give you this information. I won’t 🙂

1. Sitecore Official Study Guide

As a first step, I recommend you to download Official Study Guide for this exam from Sitecore.

You can find it / download it from here -> https://sitecore.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/16000077959-sitecore-experience-commerce-9-0-essentials-certification-developer-exam-study-guide.

You will learn from it that duration of exam is 90 minutes. You can expect 50 questions. Some have only one possible answer, some are multi-choice answers. Pass rate is 80%. It took me around 40-45 minutes to pass.

You will see in this document what topics are being examined precisely. Each topic has links to particular online or offline (pdf) documentation and specifically also with notes in which chapter / page you will find more information about these topics.

This is really great starting point. Just follow this document.

You can also print it out or copy it to OneNote and tick out things you have already covered 😉

2. Theoretical preparation for exam

Now you have learnt what is examined in first step.

In this second step, I will show you how you can prepare for this exam in theoretical meaning. By this I mean, which documentation you need to read and which recordings you need to watch. All resources mentioned in this step cover documentation that is suggested also in official study guide + I am adding my own resources.

During preparation for this exam I have also created eReader friendly versions (mobi, ePub, PDF) of all documentation that was only available online from Sitecore. This will help you to prepare for exam while commuting or traveling 😉 Here are direct links to documentation that I have created:

2.1. Documentation

Read all of below mentioned documentation at least once before proceeding to next steps. Developer’s and DevOps guides are probably good to read more than once to digest everything and remember information written and described there.

2.2 YouTube – Sitecore Commerce Deep Dive Series

By watching Sitecore Commerce Deep Dive Series (6 videos series):

You can recap information you have learnt from documentation in chapter 2.1

You will get a bit more information about Commerce

You will see lot of things in action

You will see information provided in documentation nicely visualized

You can watch videos separately:

You can also watch them on Youtube as playlist.

3. Practical preparation for exam

I always say that you should learn things by doing them therefore you must practice. Hence the title of this chapter.

3.1 Prepare DEV environment

Before proceeding with further steps, I highly recommend, creating a VM with Sitecore Experience Commerce 9. You can also install Commerce directly on your laptop if you wish. I just prefer VMs.

You can follow my blog post – Installing Sitecore Experience Commerce (SXC) 9.0 Initial Release – that will help you out with this task. You can also try upgrading to Update 1 just to try it out or you can already install Update 1. It should be similar. As Update 2 is out as of last week, I will definitely prepare also instructions on how to install this soon. For the exam however this is not necessary as the questions won’t cover this new release or at least any time soon 🙂

3.2 Sitecore Official Commerce Trainings

Sitecore has 2 online trainings and one onsite training (at the time of writing this blog post) that should help you out understanding Sitecore Commerce platform and nicely prepare you for exam:

You can take a look on my humble opinion on 100: Overview and 200:Essentials trainings that I have taken and passed. I highly recommend them before taking Commerce Essentials exam. They will not only theoretically prepare you for it but have also waste practical hands on exercises.

The 300:Advanced training is more practical 3-day hand-on onsite training where you. I haven’t personally taken this training so cannot say more. Just personal thought – After taking 100 and 200 trainings it would be probably good for you to take also this one but not for exam itself but to prepare yourself for developing Commerce solution in the “wild”.

3.3 Practice, Practice, Practice

Everything what you have learnt in previous chapters, you also need to practice.

I was going through the Business Tools User Guide and followed exercises from there in my VM. I have played with SXA Storefront and it’s components based on dedicated SXA Storefront documentation. I have tried to build a plugin based on Developer’s Guide. I have also followed all hands on exercises from 100 and 200 Trainings again also on my VM just to repeat the steps myself.

I had already working experience with Sitecore Commerce 8.2.1 so lot’s of concepts were known to me but some were completely new. That’s why practice is important. You will be better prepared for exam and what’s more important for “real” project battle.

What is difficult in training will become easy in a battle. (Alexander Suvorov)

4. Summary

Exam preparation is a more calm environment to learn 🙂 Storm is the “real” project sometimes 😉

Use the study time to first read documentation and then practice it.

I believe that by following this study guide, you are on right track to pass the exam and will be rewarded by nice certificate at the end as I was:

Good luck on exam!

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