After completing the KNIME L1 certification (you can read about it here), I decided to continue with L2 to deepen my understanding of the platform.
Exam Overview:
- 25 questions
- 45 minutes duration
- $50 fee
Topics Covered:
- Flow variables
- Components - configuration and view
- Workflow control - loops, switches, try and catch
- Date and time data type
- Database - access and querying
Link to KNIME's Certification Program: https://www.knime.com/certification-program
Preparation
To prepare for the exam, I completed the official free self-paced KNIME L2 course, which I found really valuable. The course is well organized and explains the concepts clearly with lots of examples, making it a strong foundation for exam preparation.
The course itself covers way more content than what is directly tested in the exam. After going through the full course once, I shifted my focus more strategically: I concentrated mostly on the topics that are actually covered in the exam.
My Experience
A lot of the logic in KNIME feels quite similar to Alteryx, which I'm very familiar with, so I wasn’t really learning completely new concepts. Instead, it was more about recognizing familiar ideas and understanding how they are implemented in KNIME. For example: KNIME components are somewhat comparable to Alteryx macros. Because of that overlap, it felt less like learning something entirely new and more like translating existing knowledge into a different tool.
One thing I didn’t particularly like was the exam interface itself. There is no option to mark or flag questions for later review. You can only move forward or backward through the questions. This wasn’t a major issue since there are only 25 questions, so it’s still easy enough to keep track of anything you might want to revisit. However, I personally prefer exam systems that allow you to flag questions, as it gives a bit more flexibility during the review process.