VMware Spring Professional
Spring Certified Professional
Pivotal Spring Professional v5.0

All what you need to know to pass VMware Spring Professional certification 2020/2021

3 min readNov 29, 2020

Foreword

After I had the opportunity to take and successfully pass the VMware Spring Professional certification exam a while ago, I would like, through this article, to share some tips and strategies to help you nail your certification exam. So get ready !

Pivotal Spring Professional v5.0 has a new official name

Since the acquisition of Pivotal by VMware; The official name of the certification was updated in 2020 and is called today VMware Spring Professional. The examen code is EDU-1202: Spring Certified Professional.
The official Le study guide was also updated in October 2020.

Beware of outdated mock-exams(dumps)

When I was preparing for my certification, I bought 8 exam dumps, which make a total of 400 questions (50 questions/exam). From all these questions, in addition to the ones I reviewed in books, I only found one question in the real exam. So don’t waste your money and keep in mind that the questions are updated all the time and vary from an exam to another. This definitly gives the Spring certification its credibility.

General information on certification

The purpose of certification

The Spring Professional Certification Exam is designed to test and validate understanding as well as familiarity with key aspects of Spring and Spring Boot such as:

Configuration, Component-scanning, AOP
Data access and Transactions
REST, Spring Security
Auto-configuration, Actuator, Spring Boot Testing

Exam Topics

Container (20%)
AOP (8%)
JDBC (4%)
Transactions (8%)
MVC (8%)
Security (6%)
REST (6%)
JPA Spring Data (4%)
Testing (4%)
Boot Into (8%)
Boot Autoconfig (8%)
Boot Actuator (8%)
Boot Testing (8%)

Bref d’examen officiel: Pivotal_ExamBrief_SpringProfessional.pdf
Study Guide officiel: Spring-Professional-Certification-Study-Guide.pdf

The headache with this exam

The exam contains several questions with multiple answers, without knowing precisely the number of correct answers, hence the difficulty of this Test.
The time constraint.
The answers contain terms that are very similar and may be misleading. You have to read the question several times.
Shades of meaning between words in the suggested answers, for example:
@Secured or @Secure
@RolesAllowed or @AllowedRoles
@Import or @Imports
datasource.setDriverClassName or datasource.setDriverClass
datasource.setConnectionURL or datasource.setUrl
password-encoded or encoded-password
TransactionTemplate, TransactionManager, TransactionInterceptor, PlateformTransactionManager

Mocks exams list

https://www.ad-satour.com/information-technology/mock-exams/vmware-spring-professional-2020–2021-9-free-mock-exams-with-answers/

My first tips for preparing the certification exam

You must first put aside the preparation methods for Spring Core and Web certification for version 3 and 4, because it is very different and it is not the same thing!
Don’t buy mock certification exams from some sites, even if they promise 100% success, and that they will refund you if you fail. Beware of these sites and especially do not believe in the comments which are mostly false and robot-generated. Note that the questions sold (www.certification-questions.com) are identical to those of the Spring version 4 exams, which you can find for free on any site.
If you happen to buy practice exams, keep in mind that none of these questions will fall back into the real exam. However, it can still help you practice and familiarize yourself with the exam. Here are some pretty credible resources:
1. (http://itestjava.com
2. https://www.udemy.com/course/pivotal-certified-professional-core-spring-5
3. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.springqcm
You should never prepare for a Certification exam in a rush. Give yourself the necessary time to prepare and assimilate all the concepts. Otherwise, they will be confused and you may fail your exam.