Intro

I recently sat and passed the Github Foundations certification, and I could only find one post describing their experience. So, I’ll do my best to describe my experience so you can judge if it’s worth it to take or not.

Overview

Github Foundations is a certification aimed at beginners (obviously) to prove their knowledge of GitHub. It’s a part of the Github Student Developer Pack which allows you to take either the foundations or copilot cert for free (only one though).

The skills tested are listed as such:

Domain 1: Introduction to Git and GitHub 22%

Domain 2: Working with GitHub Repositories 8%

Domain 3: Collaboration Features 30%

Domain 4: Modern Development 13%

Domain 5: Project Management 7%

Domain 6: Privacy, Security, and Administration 10%

Domain 7: Benefits of the GitHub Community 10%

What surprised me was the content that wasn’t about using Github as a collaboration platform for individual, open-source developers - but the knowledge tested about using gh for organisations, both developing and sys admin work.

It makes sense, this year 81.5% of commits came from private repos, so while I’ve only ever used gh for myself, it makes sense that it would cover it.

Studying

I mainly used 3 resources to study for this: Microsoft Learn’s Learning Path, FreeCodeCamp, and ghcertified.

I went through some of the learning path, though not all. I found the text quite dense, but the exercises at the end made up for a bit.

FreeCodeCamp’s youtube video was good, it’s easy to watch and had some good tutorials you could follow along with.

ghcertified.com was definitely my favourite, it’s got multi-choice questions in the same style as the actual exam, and has over 146 (as of writing) different practice questions. While you can’t only do these practice questions, as the exam has different exact content, it was what I put the most time into.

Exam

The exam was done on Pearson Vue, which was quite annoying to fully setup.

Issues

To take the exam, you have to run their executable which locks down your system.

I used their test to make sure it worked before the actual exam date, and its quite lucky since I ran into two different issues.

WSL

Having WSL installed seemed to be causing it to fail, so I had to disable it.

This is quite easy to do, you can search Turn Windows features on or off, from here it’s just a few checkboxes to untick.

Fullscreen

For some reason, whenever I opened the test, it was nearly fullscreen, but not fully.

It being slightly smaller than fullscreen took ages to notice, and I spent over an hour before I realised this. Please don’t make the same mistake as me.

Exam Content

I touched on this earlier, but there was a surprising amount not related to what a developer might need to know.

A lot was related to how organisations work, about managed gh users, Single Sign On, etc.

This is why Microsoft Learn can be very helpful as it lists it all. It’s quite a bit of content you have to learn/memorise, but none of it’s hard.

Thoughts

While it wasn’t that hard, and mainly felt like a gh trivia quiz, I’m still happy I got it.

I’m in my final year of comp sci as of writing this, and have no professional experience while applying to jobs, so I’ll take any leg up I can get.

It’s surprising the lack of skill/use of git and gh some of my peers have, so having something that can prove I’m at least a bit competent is quite useful (although having any project on gh proves this as well lol).

But quite importantly, it was free! So there was no downside except the bit of time invested in revising for it.

Conclusion

I’d say if you’re a student, it’s something you should definitely consider getting. While it might not be as good as a great personal project or an internship, its still helps round out a portfolio or cv.

It’s nice to have an actual tech cert instead of random ones like first-aid ahaha.

If you can’t get it for free, or already have some experience working, then I would skip it. It’s not worth the full cost, and actual experience will always be more valuable.