Hey party people! I’m in a really good mood at the moment because I’ve just passed my Alteryx Designer Advanced Exam! I wasn’t sure I was going to pass so a 95% result was a nice surprise 🙂
Anyway, following on my previous post on Alteryx Designer Core Exam, I decided to share my experience and some tips while it’s still fresh in my memory.
The Certification
Since my last post, things have changed and now the community certification is on demand (that applies to Core and Advanced), which means you can take it whenever you want. The only limitation is that you have to wait seven days in case you need to retake the exam.
The exam lasts 2h and consists of 44 questions that are about report tools, spatial tools and macros and apps. There were also some questions about Alteryx Gallery and some more advanced tools like multi-join tool or multi-field binning.
The Preparation
I didn’t do any specific preparation for this exam. However, I did continue with my weekly challenges (I’m at 61 at the moment) and we had some very helpful training at the DS in the past weeks. It did help a lot that we had a very Alteryx-heavy client project last week. The mentioned training involved Macros (with Phil), RegEx (with Peter), Alteryx Gallery (with Ben), and this week we’ve been doing some data preparation and spatial operations (with Dan) in Alteryx as well. I guess all of this together gave me a solid base of knowledge for the exam.
For those who don’t have DS training on a daily basis, I would suggest to go through the prep guide and at least read up on the mentioned areas. You could also join one of the training sessions run at the data school and get the training yourself: https://www.meetup.com/Lets-talk-Data/
The Exam
The exam started with some questions on report tools which I have barely used at all and so I didn’t have high hopes for the rest of the test. But then once questions from other sections showed up I began to think I might be able to pull it off.
Stick to the order (initially). What is important, is that there are many questions that are awarded only one point each and a handful awarded 10 points. Looking from the passing perspective it would seem more sensible to first do those for 10 points and then look at those one-pointers. I don’t think this is the best approach. I would suggest not spending ages on a one-pointer but I’d try to approach all questions in the given order (ten-pointers are at the end). This is because some easy question might be really helpful for those long ones. At any time, you can access all viewed questions and go back if you need.
Alteryx is your friend. It’s an open book exam so I tested many things in Alteryx Desginer itself. When I couldn’t find the answer quickly, I opened documentation or just googled some of the information.
Time is tight. At first, I thought there was very little time for the whole exam. Then I thought there’s load. In the end, I answered my last question within the last minute of the exam. When you’re reaching the end of the exam you may have a lot of time left. The problem is the last questions are very time-consuming. You’re given some data sets and have to create a workflow to answer specific questions. Weekly Challenges are a good practice for that.
Final Thoughts
- It’s intense two hours.
- It’s not easy but it’s not super difficult either.
- You need to be fast.
- Alteryx and Google are your friends.
- Start with the order of questions but don’t dwell on one-pointers for too long.
- Don’t stress out, it’s free and you can retake it after a week.
- As with the Core Exam, it’s a good learning opportunity.
Good luck!