About This Study Plan
This 90-day study plan breaks the GH-ACTIONS (Actions) exam preparation into 3 focused study sessions with 12 actionable tasks. The plan covers all 5 exam domains — Author and Manage Workflows, Consume and Troubleshoot Workflows, Author and Maintain Actions, Manage GitHub Actions for the Enterprise, Secure and Optimize Automation — ensuring complete coverage. Comprehensive 90-day plan for the GitHub Actions certification.
Prerequisites
- Basic command line skills
- 30–60 minutes per day
Study Schedule
- Weeks 1–2: Git/GitHub basics and YAML syntax
- Week 3: Workflow structure, triggers, and basic jobs
- Week 4: Runners, matrix strategies, and expressions
- End of month: Simple CI workflow for a real project
- Week 5: Marketplace actions, custom actions, and versioning
- Week 6: Secrets, variables, environments, and protection rules
- Week 7: Reusable workflows, caching, and artifacts
- Week 8: Deployment patterns and environment promotion
- Week 9: Security hardening, OIDC, and least-privilege GITHUB_TOKEN
- Week 10: Build a complete CI/CD pipeline from scratch
- Week 11: Practice exam #1 + review
- Week 12: Practice exam #2, syntax drill, and final prep
Study Tips
Automate something real — your learning repo, a side project, etc.
Read other popular open-source repos' workflow files for patterns.
The exam expects you to write/read YAML — practice syntax daily.
Recommended GitHub Study Resources
Supplement this study plan with the GitHub Skills interactive courses at skills.github.com, which provide hands-on practice in real repositories. The official GitHub documentation (docs.github.com) is comprehensive and regularly updated. For Actions certification, study the workflow syntax reference and build at least three different CI/CD pipelines from scratch.
Ready to Practice?
Put your study plan into action with Actions practice questions.