The Open Group Architecture Forum (TOGAF) 9.1

23 Jan 2016

This certification is something I’ve wanted for a while. In December I decided to quit putting it off and just do it. I booked on to the first QA course available in January. 

The course itself was very full on, over four days we went over material from 9am right through until 5pm. The first two days were very hard and I struggled to absorb the concepts as well as I had hoped, the next days it started to come together and I felt much better. There was a good group of people on the course, as is typical I was the youngest by some margin and there were no end of jokes when the trainer kept claiming that “You don’t find Enterprise Architects younger than 50 years old”. 

I booked into the exam, as the fee was included as part of the course. Thought it best to take the exam after the weekend, to allow some time for revision and practice questions. Revision went really well, I was getting high marks on practice questions and felt really good for the exam. The exam was in Bristol which is 140 miles away from home, but a fairly quick journey on the train (Managed to visit the Cushman & Wakefield office while there!). 

When arriving at the exam centre I had to be frisked and even ‘wanded’ with a metal detector each time I left the room! The exam was incredibly hard. I used almost all of the time to go over my answers as some I had absolutely no clue on. Before clicking finish I knew I was going to be cutting it fairly fine! I passed, just, with a 5% margin on both tests. Passing the exam was an enormous relief and I’m very proud to have completed it. 

The content and framework that TOGAF offers is not what I expected at all, it is much more business oriented than I anticipated and very much focused on Enterprise Architecture rather than the ‘domain’ architect towers. I learnt a great deal and I’m pleasantly surprised about how much I’ve managed to put into practical use already.

TOGAF publish a list of certified people, here is my listing: http://togaf9-cert.opengroup.org/certification-listing/h5wo