Okay so I've been lurking here for months and I figure it's time to actually contribute something useful. I failed my PAM exam back in February by 4 points — four! — and honestly I was devastated. I'd put in maybe 3 weeks of studying using just the official materials and figured that would be enough. Spoiler: it wasn't.
For my second attempt I completely changed my approach. I gave myself 6 weeks, built a proper schedule, and started using a PAM practice test bank to drill the weak areas I'd identified from my first failure. Privileged Access Management has so many overlapping concepts — just access control, session monitoring, credential vaulting — and I kept mixing them up under pressure. The practice tests helped me get the sequencing and terminology locked in.
I also found a solid PAM study guide that broke down the CyberArk and BeyondTrust framework differences in plain English, which was huge for me. My exam tips for anyone reading this: do not skip the governance sections, they hit those questions harder than you'd expect. Happy to share more if anyone's in the same boat I was.