GitHub Foundations Certification Tips

I recently completed GitHub Foundations Certification. Also being the first formal technical certification. In this post, I share the resources I found useful as well as other tips that might be helpful for anyone preparing for the same.

GitHub Student Developer Pack

If you’re currently pursuing education through an educational institution. You can get access to GitHub Student Developer Pack. With this you get GitHub Pro for the duration of your program along with several other benefits.

One of these benefits includes one free attempt at the certification examination. This is what I used for my attempt.

Resources

These might help you prepare better for the certification exam.

DataCamp GitHub Foundations Track

The student pack also contains a free 3 month trial for DataCamp platform. Here they have a quite good interactive course for GitHub Foundations tailored for certification. Includes videos & labs. It teaches about Git fundamentals, GitHub basics, GitHub projects & other features.

GitHub Foundations Learning Path on Microsoft Learn

Microsoft Learn platform also has a quite through course for GitHub Foundations Certification. In fact, it was one of the first official resources for certification exam. The entire course is text based with a few chapters containing related videos. It too, has lab exercises made with Template Repositories & GitHub Actions. I observed it covers more topics than DataCamp course. And these extra topics were asked too, so this one is highly recommended.

Additional Tips

Important topics

These are the topics I recall from the exam, for reference. I believe the questions set might be selected at random. So don’t use this list as a baseline but ensure that these topics are covered too along with other ones.

• Git Basics
• Difference between Git & GitHub
• User roles on different levels (eg. repository, organisation, etc)
• GitHub subscription plans (Free, Pro, etc)
• GitHub Marketplace
• Verified GitHub Actions
• GitHub Projects layouts
• Access management with identity providers
• Special files like README.md, CODEOWNERS, SECURITY.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md, etc
• Template files like Pull request templates, Issue templates, etc

While I’ve tried listing all resources in this post, I already had quite a bit of experience with Git & GitHub before studying for exam. Your mileage may vary. I recommend searching for content & experimenting on your own too.

Troubleshooting for student discount

I faced an issue earlier where the discount code wasn’t getting applied by itself.

Verify that on the exam registration page it shows discount message in a blue box below exam cost. If not the case, Recheck your student status and use the links from student pack page.

If any further issue arises, this discussion might help.

All the best for your test 👍✨