How I passed CGEIT in the first attempt and you can too!

ISACA’s CGEIT certification is aimed at IT professionals responsible for directing, managing, and supporting the governance of IT. I passed the ISACA’s CGEIT exam on Apr 26, 2020. Here’s a brief of my preparation strategy and the resources I used.

Strategy:

Like previous ISACA and (ISC)2 certifications, I started with the CGEIT Review Manual from ISACA and read it twice cover-to-cover. (Thanks to all the commute time from San Jose to San Francisco!). After the first read, I did the questions in the Q&A Manual and revisited the incorrect answers. At this point, I was answering 60% of the questions right. After the second read of the CGEIT Review Manual, I attempted the questions again and was scoring 80% of the questions right.

Once I was done with the above, I took the 75 question test at the end of the Q&A manual 1 week before the actual exam and scored 95% which made me feel quite comfortable with the pattern of exam questions.

The hardest domain for me was “Domain 2: Strategic management” as I had limited experience with the domain and had little real-life experiences to back up the learning. Having the CISM and a good amount of risk management experience helped me ace the “Domain 4: Risk optimization” as I scored 700+ in this domain in the final exam.

I also recommend a thorough reading of COBIT 5 and ITIL as unless you know the basics of IT processes and concepts (the difference between Availability Management & Capacity Management, issues v/s events v/s incidents, etc.), it would be hard to answer the scenario questions.

Resources:

  • CGEIT Review Manual, ISACA – link
  • CGEIT Review Questions, Answers & Explanations Manual, ISACA – link
  • COBIT 5, ISACA – link
  • ITIL – link

Related posts:

  • CISM prep strategy – link
  • CISSP prep strategy – link