I'll be honest, I was pretty demoralized after my second failed attempt. I scored a 68 both times, which is just brutally close to the 70 passing threshold. My company is paying for recertification but there's only so many times I can walk back into that conversation with my manager, you know?
What changed for my third attempt was finally committing to a real structured approach instead of just rereading the official docs. I started using an NCP practice test to identify my weak spots rather than just studying everything equally. Turns out my gaps were almost entirely in the hybrid cloud and workload migration domains — I'd been over-indexing on the infrastructure basics where I already had hands-on experience.
Anyone else find that the actual exam questions are way more scenario-based than the study materials suggest? I feel like a solid NCP study guide covering those decision-tree style questions would've saved me at least one failed attempt. Happy to share what resources I ended up using if it helps anyone else in the same boat.