Most prep guides start at chapter one. This one works backwards: derive the exam date from each vendor's retake rules (AWS makes you wait 14 calendar days, Google escalates 14 → 60 → 365 days, Microsoft allows a retake after 24 hours, and Taiwan's iPAS has no retake at all — you wait six months for the next session), then order your study by domain weight rather than domain number, and take a free official practice set before studying anything. Includes weightings for seven certifications and a five-week AIF-C01 example.
Every AI certification an engineer can register for in 2026, listed one by one: AWS AIP-C01 / MLA-C02 / AIF-C01, Google PMLE, Microsoft AI-103 and AI-500, all twelve NVIDIA exams, Databricks, Snowflake, Oracle's Agentic AI track, IBM watsonx, Salesforce Agentforce, GitHub GH-300, Anthropic's four Claude exams, Taiwan's iPAS AI Application Planner, plus the governance and audit line (IAPP AIGP, ISACA AAISM / AAIA, CertNexus CAIP) — prices, validity, and registration gates all checked against vendor pages. Two things that hit your wallet: Google's PMLE exam guide has renamed Vertex AI to Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform throughout, making pre-mid-2026 study material worthless, and the iPAS intermediate certificate is valid 5 years, not permanently.