Getting certified in the tools you are being taught is an essential part of the Data School. To ensure continuous learning and improvement of your skills you will take certification exams early on. Our first exam (Alteryx Designer Core) was scheduled for week 3 and I want to give you some insights on how to prepare and what to expect.
First of all, don’t be afraid to fail. The Alteryx Core Certification exam is an on demand exam free of charge and you can give it another try once a week. Nevertheless, you should use the time given to prepare wisely and not drag this task with you for too long.
The Alteryx Academy has a large amount of resources to study for the exam. Next to the documentation pages and community posts, there are videos to particularly prepare you for the exam.
When you are a Data Schooler those will mostly repeat the input given from your DS-trainer, but here and there you might catch a shortcut or configuration that’s new for you. Each of the four videos is about an hour long, but you can safely watch them at 1.25-1.5 times speed and skip a few minutes here and there. If you don’t have time for all of them, I recommend to watch only the last one, which shows you what to expect and gives tips on strategy and time management. If you just want to catch up on a few specific tools you will probably find good input on YouTube as well.
Probably the best way to get exam-ready is to actually work with the program. You can do so by either trying out different tools and configurations on a sample data set or by solving the weekly challenges in the Alteryx community. These will help you to translate concrete questions into combinations of tools and in addition you can see how other users approached the challenge as there are always more than one possible solutions. Usually the weekly challenges are a bit harder to solve than the practical questions in the exam but this will make them especially useful for training purposes.
Since the core exam is an open book exam, it’s essential to know where to find your information. Some question can be answered by quickly searching the Alteryx community or documentation sites. Above that, Alteryx Designer provides examples for each tool (right click on the tool and click “Open Example”) which will show you different configurations of this tool.
For some of the questions it even makes sense to quickly rebuild the given input in Alteryx with the “Text Input Tool” and try the different answering options. But always keep in mind that you only have two hours and the practical questions will be more time consuming, so rebuilding an input with eight rows and four columns should not be your weapon of choice.
During the exam you will always see how much time you have left and you will get the chance to mark questions and review them before submitting. You should not leave questions unanswered, so just take a wild guess if it takes you too long to find the answer or if you are running out of time. The same goes for the practical questions: Yes, they are three points but know when to move on. Time management is crucial and you'll pass knowing "only" 80% of the answers.