Now that I am working for an accounting firm, I am not going to have time during the day to do everything that comes up on my list. Therefore, the first training course that I wanted to take was “Exam 77-882.” I know that sounds like quite a lot of course work, but it was actually not that much.
I want to explain what I did in order to pass the test without giving away too much of the content of the course. The first thing I did was to work on my PowerPoint skills. I am still not very good with PowerPoint, but I learned how to do it well enough to pass the test without showing my boss my actual work on the screen. I am not going to give all of the details of what I did, but you can easily find the samples on the Microsoft site, or just by looking for the word file that contains the exam. The key is that I got through the work as fast as possible, and without cheating.
After I got the basic course complete, I still wanted to make sure that I understood every topic that was covered. So I spent some extra time researching online to learn about some other topics that I could use to do extra practice on. The final product that I downloaded from the official site included several quizzes and an exam. After I completed all of these, I was ready to go!
Now, I admit that I could have saved time by doing the course online. However, since this is an official course, I had to purchase the actual books along with the software to fully benefit from the course. Each of the books will cover a different topic within the course, so you definitely need to know what you are looking for. You can also download the worksheets from the website, which I also found to be helpful. The problem is that I was needing to purchase all of these things at the same time, and time was running short.
Once the book was finished, I needed to start completing work on the quizzes. Since these were done online, I knew that I wouldn’t have to wait long to get my results. However, this isn’t always the case when learning something new. Sometimes it takes a little more time to absorb information when it is being presented in an organized way. By using the worksheet templates, I was able to complete the test much faster.
As soon as I was done with the tests, it was time to move onto the main part of the course. In this section, you will be given multiple choice questions that you will need to answer to pass the course. I recommend that you do this while focusing on an item and not trying to solve the entire problem at once. Most of the time, you will find that there will only be two or three correct answers for each question, which makes this type of problem easy to tackle. The tricky part comes in for those who are really good at answering multiple choice questions. In these sections, you may find yourself pressed for time and not able to quickly determine which answer is correct.
After finishing the course, it was time to review everything that I learned and see if it will help me to improve my skills on the exam. I completed all of the practice exams, which gave me a little extra practice. Also, it was very interesting to learn that there are actually professional Calista exam experts who use Calista test prep courses to prepare for each exam that they take. I definitely learned a lot from the course and am certainly excited to take the real exam! Now that I have a better idea about how Calista test prep materials work, I know that I will be able to maximize the time that I spend studying for the exams.
