My employer is requiring that I earn my MCSA certification in order to work with a .net-based CMS we are currently having implemented. This year, an outside company was hired to do the initial implementation but eventually I am expected to be the main developer for my organization as far as maintaining the CMS and implementing new sites and features.

I believe I can pass the 70-480 exam (Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3) within the next couple of months but it's 70-486 exam (Developing ASP.NET MVC Web Applications) that I am worried about.

I was told to study for the MCSA over the course of 2018 but I have had to spend 90% of my time putting out fires (and I'm the only person on my team with the skills to do so) and developing scripts to assist with the migration to this new CMS.

And the description for exam 70-486 states:

"This exam is intended for developers with a minimum of three to five years of experience developing Microsoft ASP.NET web applications, including two or more years developing MVC-based solutions."

Link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/mcsa-web-applications-certification.aspx

Needless to say, I have not learned .NET anywhere even close to being ready for the 70-486 exam. And even if I had not had to put out so many fires, the above description suggests that it would be unrealistic for someone brand new to .net to become certified in one year.

My employer is now paying me really well (recently got a big promotion) and I want to see this project succeed.

That said, if you have your MCSA for web applications, do you think it really takes 3-5 years of experience to pass this exam?

There is such a variety between developers as far as prior programming experience, amount of free time, IQ, and work ethic, that I think it would be pretty hard for Microsoft to put a number on how many years of experience you should have before being ready for the exam. So I want to believe that it would be possible to pass in fewer than three years of working with .net.

The managers in charge of this project obviously did not see this "three to five years of experience" figure on the exam page and frankly I didn't want to point this out at the start of 2018 for fear of them deciding to get rid of me. Of course, I also (arrogantly) felt that I would be a certified MCSA dev by end of 2018 despite what the exam page says.

As of now, I've managed to buy myself some more time - I told my manager there would be no certification by end of 2018 and we agreed to re-evaluate the situation at my mid-year evaluation in July. But that's only 7 months, and based on the dynamics of my team and that "three to five years" thing, I'm worried things are going to come to a head.

I can't help but feel like I'm making excuses if I say "hey, this is not realistic" but at the same time, based on how much work I need to do on top of getting ready for this certification it really does seem unrealistic - even studying on my own time.

As for my background, I've been programming primarily with PHP at an intermediate level for about three years now. I learned to program initially in college with Java, so C# has been fairly intuitive to learn so far. I am willing (and happy) to learn on my own time, but burn out has been a problem for me.

Any advice about passing the exam (not interested in brain dumps or any kind of cheating), or what to do in this situation, would be welcome.