The Core of the Matter: Prepping for the Alteryx Designer Core Certification

The Alteryx Designer Core Certification helps you establish credibility in your career by showing that you are capable of the most essential tasks in Alteryx, and is worth working towards if you intend to use Alteryx in a professional setting (which, given the license cost, is the most likely use case). While there's room for growth afterwards with additional certifications and levels of competency to achieve, it's entirely feasible and even ideal to complete the Core certification after a few weeks of working with the software. Following this plan of attack will leave you in a good position to get certified and demonstrate value to your employer and to the data community.

Know Thy Enemy

First step is to make sure you have an Alteryx Community profile, ideally with a personal email address (you want to keep your certifications if you don't continue with your current employer, after all). That having been accomplished, read and ideally download the Core Certification Exam Prep Guide. While you can, in theory, go in without checking out the 23 tools you should be familiar with or knowing what tasks you need to be able to accomplish, it's rather foolish to do so. Learn the format - 2.5 hours, open book (you can and should Google things), no pausing to come back to it later. Be aware of the breakdown of questions - there is some overlap with the Foundations Micro-Credential (more on that later), and there is a disproportionate emphasis on loading, cleaning, and outputting data. Learning the format and basic expectations helps you plan your prep time.

Two handy bookmarks that, as of the time of publication, had just recently changed location and were temporarily hard to find through googling:

Follow the Prep Guide

The Alteryx interactive prep guides have a lot of great resources, and I and most others in my cohort used the Core Certification interactive as a supplement for what we were learning in the classroom. It's a good primary study guide, too, with a lot of overlap with what we did in the classroom. You'll do practice exam questions and get suggestions for Weekly Challenges that you should do. Speaking of which...

Don't Stop Challenging Yourself

Alteryx Weekly Challenges are intensely valuable. First, a good number of questions on the exam ask you how to recreate a specific output. The Weekly Challenges format of finding the method to create an output is directly helpful for answering those questions with accuracy and - if you're struggling to finish on time - speed. Second, the content of most of the beginner and intermediate difficulty questions is relevant to many of the questions, even if they don't share the "recreate this output" format. Third, if you struggle to motivate yourself to prepare for a test when you're not sure how it will help you in your job, that format is very helpful for data preparation. Knowing how to get raw data into a format helpful for visualization helps you add value to your team.

Page 12 of the Prep Guide has a list of helpful challenges. Your learning needs may be different, but you shouldn't need to worry about doing all of them. The interactive guide recommended:

I further recommend:

Practicing joins, transposition, cross tabs, and date/time formats is very helpful for the exam, and also helpful when preparing data.

Micro-Credentials Lead to Macro Progress

If you have any experience with Alteryx (as in, a week or two's worth of practice), it's worth doing the Alteryx Foundation Micro-Credential on the Product Certification page first. It's lower-risk, and you'll get some idea of whether you've mastered some of the foundational data analytics skills. So download the prep guide, make sure you've covered those topics, and knock that out first. In order to avoid exhaustion, plan to take it about a day before you take your Designer Core exam.

Take Care of Your Machine

Your biological machine, that is. You have two and a half hours - probably plenty of time, but everybody has different needs. To succeed, you'll need to be able to keep a good clip throughout that time, so build the conditions needed for success. Have a not-too-huge meal with a good balance of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates (unless you're on keto) with, ideally, some fiber, so that your brain has a consistent supply of glucose while you're placing heavy demands on it. Practice good sleep hygiene the night before and, ideally, two nights before, especially if you're not really good at the whole falling asleep thing. Your ability to maintain concentration for the whole exam will help you pick up points that you might miss if you haven't gotten good quality sleep and solid nutrition; concentration takes effort.

Don't forget that the timer cannot be paused, but you can go ahead and get out of your chair and use the restroom/get your eyes onto something else temporarily. Unlike many certification exams, you have control over your own workspace and, if you can move through questions at a reasonable enough pace, you have the power and ability to take a break or two.

Wrapping it all up

If you follow these steps and go in with an earnest desire to fill in gaps in your understanding and a commitment to working through the prep material, you'll find yourself doing well on the exam. That Credly badge you can put on your LinkedIn profile will help you demonstrate value to clients, potential employers, and yourself. Go get it!

Author:
Aaron Potts
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