Cloud technologies are in a constant state of flux, so it's almost impossible to be 100% up to date with the very latest content. That said, ACG learners are most concerned with two things:
- Will this course help prepare me for the certification exam?
- Will this course help provide me with current industry knowledge for my career?
The answer to both of these questions is yes.
ACG courses provide current industry content to teach you valuable job skills and assist you in passing the exam. Additionally, courses are tagged New (opens in new tab) as they're published to help you identify the latest important releases.
In this article
Certification courses
ACG maintains certification courses to keep pace with the material on each vendor's certification exam. As new technologies and features are announced, our ACG content team takes actions such as:
- Considering their relevance to the exam.
- Considering if and when they're likely to start appearing on the exam.
- Adding notes or practice questions about them, if needed.
As the service or feature becomes more common, and we have feedback that it is starting to creep into the exam, we assess the impact, and update our content on the topic as appropriate. This process is constantly underway with courses updated monthly, and some almost weekly.
We do rely on learner feedback, so if you see something on the exam that you don't think was introduced or covered in our course, please let us know the topic and the type of questions so that we can reevaluate the course.
Note: We don't intend to teach every possible topic or question that might show up on the exam. We teach foundational skills, plus topics that have a high probability of being on the exam. This is sufficient to help you become skilled in cloud and pass the exam if you study diligently. You can achieve higher skills and higher exam scores with additional study of the external resources and links we provide.
Non-certification courses
The ACG content team sets the content of these courses based on what's appropriate for the skill levels targeted and the expected entry skills. It's not practical to teach everything from foundation to expert in one course. Consequently, learners need to choose courses based on their entry skills and their desired skill level. In some cases, that may require a number of courses to reach the highest level of skill.
Within that framework, the ACG content team maintains and updates these courses as appropriate. Courses are up to date at the time of release, and continue to be updated at intervals. If updating is no longer a practical approach, the course may be replaced.
If you feel a course is missing a feature or attribute that's sufficiently important and appropriate to the course's targeted skill level, please submit a content feedback request for review by our content team. Supplementary resources may be added to the course until it can be updated.
Course updates
ACG updates courses as needed—sometimes to fix small things like typos, and other times to add a lot of new information. To reflect the biggest changes, ACG often creates completely new courses, and retires the older versions they replace.
Exam changes
Certification exams take a while to catch up to the leading edge of cloud services. New features and services often lag by nine months or more before they're added to exams, and many never appear at all. Since ACG certification courses target individual vendors' certification exams (not all possible topics), newer features may be mentioned but given lower priority until learners report back that those new topics appeared on their exams. This approach helps keep courses more focused and relevant.
Service updates
Cloud vendors make dozens of changes every week. It takes a lot of time and resources to update our content every time cloud services undergo even small changes. Consequently, while we focus on priority updates, some clips may remain in a course unchanged because the service is fundamentally unchanged. The age of a course is not necessarily a measure of the validity of the material being taught.
Fundamentals
It's most important to understand foundational services, even if a vendor brings out new service offerings that seem to supplant them. For the exam, you need to understand how services work more than all the details of the latest feature set.
Updated content
Courses we've recently updated display an Updated tag to indicate new content. Some learners find this useful when reviewing for exams to ensure they've seen the most recent material.
If you need help, please contact Pluralsight Support.