Passing the CompTIA Security + Exam: My journey

I decided to take the Security + Exam. I told myself that it would be a great certification to place on my resume and show employers that I know some stuff. I took it yesterday on March 26th 2025 and passed with a 769. I want to share my journey and tell you all how I did and how you can definitely do it. The odds weren’t in my favor, but I passed and so can you!

Almost one year ago, or nine months ago, I started studying to take the Security + Exam. I was originally studying for the SY0-601 version of the exam since it was long enough ago to where that was the exam I could take. I told myself that I would take it before July 2024. I never took it, and after that, I pushed it back even further. That is my first tip. But before that, Make sure that you are studying for the SY0-701 Exam!! If you are using anything else to study, it is wrong and will hurt your progress.

SCHEDULE THE EXAM!

Pay the money necessary to get the voucher and book a test date! This will actually do something to you. It will tell you that you do not have all that much time to get this done. If you have a deadline, you will force yourself to do it. Because I have a small confession here as well. You can reschedule the exam even after booking a set date. I rescheduled it once. I took it on March 26, but I was suppose to take it on Feburary 18th originally. But this March deadline pushed me to the absolute limit. I had no other choice. It was quite literally “now or never”, “speak now or forever hold your peace”, “sink or swim”. I had to take the exam by this March 26th and that gave me a little bit of energy to study. Spending the real life dollars that I earned to take this exam really lit a fire underneath me.

Study Material to Avoid

Now, this is a no BS guide and with that, I will give my complete honest opinon. Do not waste your time going along with Jason Dion’s Udemy Training Course. Now, Jason Dion is very popular and he does plenty of other IT Certification training courses. I just wouldn’t recommend his course for the Security +. To give him credit, some folks say that he does an excellent job with this course and multiple other ones that he also teaches or hosts, but I am not a fan.

1. He doesn’t do the objectives in order. Which means that he bounces around topics in different modules and in the same course videos, he will go over so much different content that is realated to each other (to give him credit) but makes it harder for you to align it to the exam objectives.
2. He doesn’t have very high quality videos. They look like something I would make if I was just trying to hit a deadline. They get very boring really quickly.

Just my own opinion, don’t go through his course. This is from someone who has done his whole course and has hand written notes from each video. I will actually post all my notes in another post because where else will they ever be useful at this point? I really dedicated too much time to those videos and it was not worth it at all. Yet I will say this, Go over all the material. Start to finish. Get an idea of what everything is, what it does, how it functions in a corperate environment.

Professor Messer

With that, Professor Messer is the best way to go through all the course material. He goes through all the objectives and is very clear and concise in his videos. If you watch the course material on youtube (forgot to mention, but his videos going over all the material is FREE), you can also speed up the videos to get through them faster, if that’s your taste.

First off, I want to say that I am not sponsored. I recommend to buy the $50 Notes and Exams Bundle on his website. Please click here to go to that link! This bundle is the reason I passed the exam.

Like I said, go through all the domains and material in those videos. Review, make sure you understand concepts even after a couple days of not reviewing. Also, Don’t worry TOO much about the acronyms. They aren’t as big a deal as you think. Just know the major ones and you should be good. Then, take the first practice exam that is included in Professor Messer’s practice exam. Also as you are taking this exam, write down the terms you don’t know, don’t remember, etc. You will do terribly on this first attempt because after reviewing all the course material, you aren’t going to remember everything. That is the goal of this practice exam.

Exam Objectives

All of Professor Messer’s free youtube videos go through each domain and explain all the bullet points, here is a link to the SY0-701 Objectives

How to “get it”

All the answers to the questions in the exam are simple to know when you understand why some answers are right and why some answers wrong. You won’t do well and the good thing about Professor Messer’s exams is that there is a answer bank and a detailed walkthrough for the answers and incorrect options on the questions. Read every single one. Even the ones you got right. Ask yourself, “why did I pick this answer?” and on a seperate sheet of paper, reflect on it. Review the objectives that you got wrong on the exam and study them. Make it a goal to remember. Then, study the material that you didn’t know or didn’t remember from your reflection paper and take the test again after a couple of days when you “forget” and it isn’t super fresh in your brain, if that makes sense. Then you will “get” how to answer each question and why some answers are better than others.

Be Confident

If you take Professor Messer’s practice exams, you know all the obhjectives and all the major acryonms, take other practice exams on youtube from Technical Institute of America and Cyber James, you will pass. Of course, I also think if you have time and have the money to spend on the official CompTIA Material and other 3rd Party Material, you should. I was not nervous taking the exam. I zoomed by the questions because I was confident in my answers almost each time. That is how you want to be on the practice exams and on the real thing, in my opinion.

On a side note, I almost cried when I saw my result. I worked so hard to get to this momment. A lot has happened this past 6 months and I felt like the entire world was waiting to watch me fail this exam. To everyone reading this, beat the odds. No matter how hard it was to study, no matter how hard it was to go through these practice exams and get a 50% on my first attempt and work my way up to a better score and thinking it still wouldn’t be enough. Prove everyone wrong. If I can do it, you can do it. The world is yours.

Good Luck World!