# Seven Microsoft Certificates in one year! 🙌

I'm happy to share that I passed AZ-305 today, which brings my total to seven Microsoft certifications. You can verify it here: [AZ-305 Microsoft Learn credential](https://learn.microsoft.com/api/credentials/share/en-us/PATRICKKOOREVAAR-0854/C5D6545632EDA3FA?sharingId=A52A659CC668BC7A).

I didn't start from scratch. I already had quite a bit of hands-on Azure experience, and part of this journey was about turning that experience into recognized certifications.

Looking back at the path I followed, my certification order was:
AZ-900, AZ-204, AI-900, AI-102, AZ-104, AZ-400, AZ-305

Now that I've completed them all, I would recommend a slightly different order for most people:
AZ-900, AZ-104, AZ-305, AZ-204, AZ-400, AI-900, AI-102

My main reason is that AZ-104 gives you a strong practical Azure foundation, and AZ-305 builds very naturally on top of that. There is a lot of overlap between the two, especially around identity, networking, governance, storage, and infrastructure design. In my opinion, AZ-305 is best done soon after AZ-104 while those concepts are still fresh.

AZ-204 and AZ-400 also become easier to approach once you already understand the Azure platform well. For AI-900 and AI-102, I personally think it helps to leave them a bit later unless AI is your main focus, because then you can connect the concepts more easily to real Azure services and architecture decisions. But I wanted to get these certificates earlier 😄

So in summary:
Start with AZ-900, move to AZ-104, then AZ-305, and build out from there depending on whether your focus is development, DevOps, or AI.
For me, this journey has been a great way to structure my learning, validate what I already knew, and strengthen my hands-on work with Azure, Kubernetes, DevOps, and cloud architecture.

![My Azure Certifications Journey infographic](https://images.koorevaar.com/linkedin-import/seven-microsoft-certificates-in-a-year.jpg)

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*Co-authored with Claude.*

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