How I Prepared for the AWS Certified Generative AI Developer Professional Exam
I passed the AWS Certified Generative AI Developer Professional exam this July, and I'll say this upfront: it's harder than the Solutions Architect Professional — especially if you're newer to GenAI itself rather than to AWS as a platform. I've held SAP-C02 for a while, and I still found this one to be a different kind of difficult. Here's what actually worked, what didn't, and what I'd tell anyone prepping for it now.
What I used
Courses: I went through Stephane Maarek's course and Rahul Trishal's course on Udemy. Both are solid for building the underlying concepts, and I'd recommend starting there if you're structuring your prep the same way I did.
Practice tests: I also tried Jon Bonso's practice tests, and honestly, they weren't that helpful for this particular exam. What actually moved the needle was AWS's own official sample questions and AWS's full-length pretest. If you only have time for one source of practice questions, make it the AWS-provided ones — they're a much closer match to the real exam's style and difficulty than third-party question banks.
Claude: For topics that were harder to grasp conceptually, I used Claude to get things explained in a different way than the course material presented them — especially useful when a concept just wasn't clicking from video lectures alone.
Hands-on practice: I built a few simple projects using Bedrock. This mattered more than I expected going in. GenAI concepts that feel abstract in a course become concrete fast once you're actually wiring up a model, handling prompts, and seeing where things break.
What makes this exam hard
Two things stood out:
- The questions are long. Not just longer than average — genuinely dense, with a lot of context you have to hold in your head before you get to what's actually being asked.
- It's a different kind of hard if GenAI is new to you. If you're coming from a strong AWS background but haven't spent much time with GenAI concepts specifically, don't assume your AWS experience will carry you the way it might for other professional-level exams. The GenAI-specific depth is real, and it's tested seriously.
The one tip that actually helped
Read the question like an architect, and start from the last lines first. The end of a long question is usually where the edge case or the actual constraint lives — the detail that rules out three of the four answer choices immediately. Once I started reading that way, I could zero in on the right answer much faster instead of getting lost re-reading the whole scenario from the top every time.
If I were prepping again
I'd spend less time on third-party practice questions and go straight to AWS's own sample questions and pretest earlier in my prep, not as an afterthought near the end. And I'd start the hands-on Bedrock projects sooner — they did more for my actual understanding than another round of video lectures would have.