What to Do After Cantrill: The AWS Certification and Project Roadmap
Finished Adrian Cantrill's AWS course? Here’s exactly how to book your exam, close skill gaps, build proof of work, and choose your next certification without falling into tutorial limbo.
You finished Cantrill. Now turn that into proof.
Adrian Cantrill’s courses are some of the most complete AWS certification resources available. They are not passive video courses. If you’ve finished one, you’ve already moved beyond exam dumps into real architectural thinking. But knowledge decays quickly if you don’t apply it. The next moves should be deliberate: certify, build, close gaps, then specialize.
1. Schedule the exam before you feel ready
The biggest mistake after finishing Cantrill is waiting until you feel ready. You won’t. Booking the exam creates a deadline and makes the review measurable.
Read the official [AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam guide](https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-architect-associate/).
Take one or two practice exams from [Tutorials Dojo](https://tutorialsdojo.com/aws-certification-practice-exams/) or the practice exams inside Cantrill’s course.
Map every wrong answer back to specific Cantrill modules, not just the question.
Book the exam within 2–3 weeks of finishing the course.
Passing is not the goal. Exposing blind spots while the material is still fresh is the goal.
2. Build something small enough to finish
Guided labs teach you the mechanics. Unguided projects teach you judgment. Use the [AWS Free Tier](https://aws.amazon.com/free/) and build something you can put in a public GitHub repo.
A serverless image resizing pipeline with S3, Lambda, and CloudFront.
A static website deployed with Terraform, CloudFront, and Route 53.
A security baseline that enables CloudTrail, AWS Config, and a budget alarm in a new account.
A CloudWatch dashboard for a simple web app.
Write a README that explains the architecture, a failure scenario, and how you would improve it. This is the kind of proof that matters in interviews.
> Rule of thumb: if you can’t build it without a guided lab, you don’t know it yet.
3. Close gaps using the score report
After you sit the exam, AWS provides a domain-level score report. Treat it as your next study plan.
Weak in networking? Rebuild the VPC sections from Cantrill and read the [AWS VPC documentation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/).
Weak in security? Work through the [AWS Well-Architected Framework](https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/) security pillar.
Weak in cost optimization? Deploy budget policies and tagging in AWS Organizations.
Cantrill gives you the model. AWS docs and [AWS Skill Builder](https://skillbuilder.aws/) fill in the changes that happen after a course is recorded.
4. Choose your next certification based on job role, not alphabet
There is no universal next cert after Cantrill. It depends on the role you are targeting.
Operations: SysOps Administrator Associate.
Development: Developer Associate.
Security: Security Specialty after one associate cert.
Architecture depth: Solutions Architect Professional after 3–6 months of hands-on work.
Avoid collecting certifications because they are adjacent. A certification should match the job you want, not the dashboard you want to show.
5. Re-enter the Cantrill ecosystem for advanced topics
Cantrill’s Professional and specialty courses go much deeper. If you’ve completed an associate-level course and have been building in AWS, the Professional course is a natural continuation. If you haven’t built enough yet, revisit the advanced networking, hybrid architectures, and identity modules instead.
At Sapior, we see the best engineers are not the ones who can recite services. They are the ones who can debug live infrastructure and explain the trade-offs. Pair your Cantrill learning with small, observable services so you can talk about real decisions.
6. Document and share what you learned
The final step is to make your learning visible.
Write a short post about one AWS service you misunderstood before.
Record a 5-minute walkthrough of your project.
Publish a Terraform module or CloudFormation template to GitHub.
Join AWS community challenges or a local meetup.
Explaining what you learned without the course narrative forces you to own the material.
The after-Cantrill loop
Certify → build → close gaps → specialize. If you skip the build step, you become a cert holder who can’t operate AWS. If you skip the cert, you miss the structured review. After Cantrill, do both.