Day by day
| Days | What to do |
|---|---|
| 1 | Mock exam 1, cold, to find your gaps |
| 2–3 | Brokers, storage, internals and replication, with their question sets |
| 4 | Reliable delivery and exactly-once semantics |
| 5 | Producers, consumers and errors, with a focus on the defaults |
| 6 | Schemas, the Admin Client and Kafka Connect |
| 7 | Security, monitoring and Kafka Streams |
| 8 | Mock exam 2, then review every wrong answer |
| 9–10 | The chapters behind those answers, and their question sets |
| 11 | Mock exam 3 |
| 12 | Mock exam 4 and the cheatsheets |
| 13 | Mock exam 5, light review |
| 14 | Mock exam 6, or rest before the exam |
Who it is for
Confluent's blueprint recommends 6 to 12 months of hands-on experience before the exam. If you have that, the first mock exam quickly shows which parts you really know and which you just use without thinking about them. If day 1 goes badly, switch to the four-week plan.
Signs you need four weeks instead
You probably need the longer plan if you've used producers and consumers but never configured replication or security, if Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect are new to you, or if more than a third of your answers on mock exam 1 were wrong or guesses.
What makes two weeks work
It takes two to three hours a day, every day, and you need to do the mock exams the way the real one runs, with 90 minutes on the clock and no notes. The practice exam page explains how to sit one and what to do with the score.
