How I Prepped for the ISTQB Foundation Exam (With Some Help from a Udemy Course)
By the time you read this, I’ll already have the official ISTQB Foundation Level certificate. But before I sat that exam, I needed to actually learn the material and the course I followed was the Udemy course ISTQB Foundation Level V4.0 Complete Training. I finished it on 18 February 2026.
Why I went with an online course
An online course was a practical choice for me because I could combine it with work and other responsibilities. It was also inexpensive compared with many classroom based training programmes. I did not have to attend lessons at fixed times or travel to a classroom. I could study when I had the time and energy, pause when a concept required more attention, and repeat sections whenever necessary.
That freedom was one of the strongest aspects of the course. Self paced learning does require discipline, but it also lets you spend your time where it creates the most value. Familiar topics can be completed more quickly, while difficult subjects can receive additional attention. The course also included quizzes that gave me immediate feedback on my knowledge. They helped me recognise which topics I understood and which ones needed further revision.
The teaching
The course is taught by Tarek Roshdy, with Nezam Academy and the Nezam Team behind it. I got on well with his style. ISTQB Foundation looks like a vocabulary test from the outside, but half the difficulty is that the terms sound alike and sit inside one big process: test levels, test types, static testing, techniques, defect management, planning. Once you see how they hang together, the similar-sounding ones stop tripping you up.
Going at my own pace helped more than I expected
Being able to stop and replay things is underrated. In a classroom, if you miss something, the lesson just… keeps going. Here, I split the 36 hours into chunks over weeks and went back to specific chapters when I was revising for the exam.
One thing to be clear about
The Udemy certificate shown with this article is a certificate of completion. It says that I finished the course. That is all. It is not the official ISTQB Foundation certificate, which is obtained by passing an exam through an accredited ISTQB exam provider. I passed that exam separately and therefore hold the official ISTQB Foundation certification as well.
The date on my Udemy completion certificate is later than the date of my official ISTQB certificate. This is because I had already completed the lessons and passed the official exam, but still had a few mock exams left to finish on Udemy. I completed those afterwards so that the platform could mark the entire course as finished and issue its certificate of completion.
Both certificates are nice to have, but they do not represent the same achievement. The Udemy certificate shows that I completed the training and put in the study time. The official ISTQB certificate confirms that I passed the actual certification exam.