Preparing yourself for the CTFL Exam

A friend of mine has recently passed the CTFL Exam after one week of a lot of study and effort. CTFL is a popular Certified Tester Foundation Level exam in software testing. It examines your professional knowledge around software testing discipline. The exam has 40 questions and takes 60 minutes.

Should I take the exam ?

This is a very debatable subject and people can discuss for hours about it’s value.

If you are thinking about if this is for you or not, these are some things that you can keep in mind and help you to decide:

• Experience always has more value than any certification. Certifications don’t provide the exposure and training you get while working on real life projects !
• THIS CERTIFICATION CAN HELP YOU TO GET YOUR FIRST QA JOB. If you are changing careers, never worked with Software Testing before, then this certification might help you to be selected for an interview. This would be part of your portfolio and as you might not have any experience in this field, this can be used as a parameter when filtering the candidates.
• THE CERTIFICATION DOESN’T MEAN YOU ARE AN EXPERT OR THAT YOU ARE GETTING THE JOB. Most of the professionals applied to this certification in the beginning of their career and then never study the Syllabus again. This is because you start to use your experience more than the base knowledge you got when studying for the exam. Again the certification doesn’t mean you will get the job, experience and exposure to different projects will.

Online Course

Mock Exams/Material and Syllabus links

• Best website to do mock tests: https://testpot.com/exams/istqb-online-test/56b3dac62527e42823ff53bf/
• https://www.istqb.org/certification-path-root/foundation-level-2018.html
• https://www.istqb.guru/istqb-foundation-level/
• https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/istqb-free-updates/
• https://www.guru99.com/istqb.html
• https://www.softwaretestinggenius.com/full-study-material-for-istqb-foundation-to-all-3-advanced-level-certification-exams/
• https://www.processexam.com/category/ctfl-study-guide-material
• https://istqb.patshala.com/tests/
  

When do I know I am ready ?

One technique that I use for actually most of the exams that I apply is practicing the mock exams and once I pass 3 times in a row then it means I am mostly ready to take the real one. You might have other ways to see when you are actually ready, but whatever you follow make sure to prepare and dedicate yourself !