I'm a fire alarm technician with 5 years in the field working toward certification on NFPA 72. My company is pushing for it and honestly the exam is harder than I expected. The code is dense and there's a real difference between knowing how to do the work and knowing where every specific requirement lives in the document.
I've been going through the 2022 edition of NFPA 72 itself, which is obviously the authoritative source, but the document is over 400 pages and navigating it efficiently under exam conditions is its own skill. I've heard mixed things about the NICET study materials — some people swear by them, others say the official NFPA online training is more aligned to what actually shows up.
My current weak spots are Chapter 14 (inspection, testing and maintenance) and Chapter 24 (emergency communications). I'm scoring around 68% on practice questions in those chapters versus 80%+ on detector placement and notification appliance sections where I have direct field experience. Exam date is 8 weeks out, doing about 90 minutes a day on weekdays and 3 hours on Sundays.
Eight weeks at your study pace is plenty if you're consistent. I passed with 79% doing similar hours. If your exam format is open-book, practice tabbing your code document — that skill alone can save you 15 minutes on test day.
Chapter 14 is a lot of memorization of specific testing intervals and the exact criteria for each device type. Flashcards work well for that chapter. I made a card for every device type with the test frequency and acceptance criteria and ran through them every morning for 3 weeks.
The NFPA online training matched my exam questions much more closely than the NICET prep materials did. That said, the NICET materials are worth doing for the additional practice volume. Both together is better than either alone.
Your field experience is actually a liability in one specific way — you'll answer from what you've seen done on real jobs rather than what the code literally says. Those two things aren't always the same. Force yourself to look up the code citation for every answer.