In my Passed the Open FAIR Exam post, I mentioned there were some issues with some of the questions on the exam not matching what I studied. Since I wrote the blog post, I printed and did quick reviews of the O-RA v2.0  and the O-RT v3.0.

The questions I remember struggling with did come from the newer versions of the Knowledge Body. So if you’re going to study for the Certification Exam, even though the Certification Page still lists the old documents, you’ll want to study the new standards.

Last year, I took the RiskLens FAIR training course to learn the FAIR-U software before teaching FAIR as the Risk Management part of the graduate-level Risk Management and Incident Response class I taught [*]. The course came with an Open FAIR certification exam voucher.

After passing the GOSI in June, I took a few weeks off and started then studying for the Open FAIR certification exam. My study material and method was:

• Measuring and Managing Information Risk (Amazon affiliate link)
• RiskLens OpenFAIR Level 1 Certification Study Guide
• The Open Group Certification for People FAIR Conformance Requirements
• The Open Group’s An Introduction to the Open FAIR Body of Knowledge
• The Open Group Standard Risk Taxonomy (O-RT), Version 2.0
• The Open Group Standard Risk Analysis (O-RA)
• The Open Group Study Guide Open FAIR Foundation: Preparation for the Open FAIR Part 1 Examination

Now there is a new version of both the O-RT and the O-RA that came out this year. But after asking the member team at the FAIR Institute if I should get the new versions in case the test changed, they said I should be okay using the older material.

After taking the exam about six weeks after asking that question, I think I should have studied the new versions, even though the other study material doesn’t appear updated yet. Some of the questions on the exam didn’t make sense, and  I suspect they reflected the change in the new versions of the O-RT and the O-RA. I need to check that, but I wanted a few days of downtime to read other things.

[*] I’m not teaching this term; part-time lectures are used to fill classes that the department doesn’t have Full or Part-Time professors (Ph.D.) for courses. The department has also been hiring more Ph. Ds the last few years, so there are more of them now, meaning they need fewer lectures. It also means I have more free time to work on personal things. While the job says part-time, I spent more time doing class-related administrative work than I did my Full-Time Day Job.

* Update 2024-10-06: changed to Amazon Affiliate Link, which I earn a commission from qualifying purchases.