How I Successfully Passed the CKA on My Second Attempt

I’m a cloud and systems technician in the IT industry and I typically experience escalated cluster upgrades, production issues, CI/CD failures (always someone else's fault), and ongoing work to maintain stability among platforms weekly. I use Kubernetes regularly but have been waiting for an off period from work to obtain the CKA certification - which never seems to happen; I finally decided to schedule my CKA exam, study as I believe would be successful, but ultimately failed. After that, I realized two things: one, I didn’t really know how the CKA was structured and tested; two, I need to make changes in my methodology for preparing for the CKA. In this blog post I want to describe how I ultimately passed the CKA on my second attempt, and detail some findings I learned during my preparation (i.e., CKA basics, how the exam is scheduled and proctored, how I initially failed my first attempt and what helped me improve for my second attempt, and how I utilized CERTIFICATION EXAM testing