ISACA would only be offering the exam twice a year, once in June and once in December each year. So taking the exam would be requiring a little planning. If you’re one of those people that’s considering the exam this year, I have some advice for you. If you wish to have you the CISA Certification, you should gain the SPOTO Club’s Training Courses, to help you out achieving the CISA Certification.
- Start Planning Now. You could just wait until May as well as they expect to pass the exam. First of all, registrations for the exam are cut off in April. That would be meaning that you have to at least sign up for the exam for two months in advance. If you don’t sign up you might not be able to pass the exam. Once you would have signed up for the exam, the second part of this step would be to make yourself a training schedule as well as stick to it.
- Digest the ISACA Review Manual. You should plan on reading the Review Manual from ISACA for the year you take the exam. This is the authoritative material that the exam questions are going to be based on. You should focus your time on this book, read it cover to cover, and also make sure that you understand everything inside. Also, along with it, you should opt for the prep courses which are being offered at the SPOTO Club.
- Attending an In-Depth Review Course. There would be a lot of courses out there run by volunteers, especially local ISACA chapters that would be trying to help their members with study sessions. These classes could be good refreshers, but make you need to make sure that you know, they’re just that refreshers run by good-hearted volunteers. If you would be taking a short review class, boot camp, or trying to prepare on your own to make sure you know, you would be having to spend a lot more time for the preparation of the exam on your own. If you are self-motivated, these methods would be working. But if you need structure to help you with your goals, you should consider signing up for a course that would be helping you to mentor through the materials from beginning to finish, and that won’t assume you would already know the information.
- Begin Thinking Like an Accountant. This is believed to be one of the best pieces of advice you could get when you’re preparing for the exam. Remember, most of the people who would be writing the CISA exam are either accountants or work in the financial services industry. They would be thinking like accountants. They don’t think like technology geeks or Information Security professionals. Begin to ask yourself the question, that what would be an accountant thinking about this question? This would be helping you tremendously especially once you start taking practice tests as well as are trying to decide between two answers that both seem like they could be valid answers.
- Taking as Many ISACA Practice Tests as Possible. Like the ISACA Review Manual, you are going to focus on taking practice tests from ISACA as a part of your training schedule. Take as many ISACA practice tests as possible. This would help you to get you into the mode of being able to answer questions the way ISACA wishes you to answer them. This would be also helping to test your knowledge level of the different content areas that would be covered by the exam.
Hence if you follow the above tips and gain the SPOTO Club’s CISA Certification, you would be able to gain this certification successfully in the first attempt.
