Top ten tips for passing the Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer Certification exam
With data engineering skills being in great demand within the job market and salaries for data engineers high, many people are deciding to study towards professional qualifications to improve their skills and learn new ones.
Several people reached out to me with questions regarding passing the Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer Certification exam. Instead of answering those individually, I have decided to share my top ten tips in this article.
Below are my top ten tips for passing the GCP Data Engineer exam:
1. Watch Qwicklabs videos.
My advice is to go through all of the Qwicklabs videos from the Professional Data Engineer course to understand the solutions better. If you’re under a short time constraint, you can probably skip the hands-on labs and return to them later.
The full content of the Qwicklabs Professional Data Engineer course can be found here:
https://googlecourses.qwiklabs.com/course_templates/244
2. Practice mock exams.
One of the most helpful preparations I did for the exam was to practice mock exams and quizzes related to the qualification.
I’ve included some of the resources that I found most helpful below:
- GCP’s official mock exam: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfkWEzBCP0wQ09ZuFm7G2_4qtkYbfmk_0getojdnPdCYmq37Q/viewform
- A Cloud Guru website quizzes and mock exams: https://learn.acloud.guru/
- Examtopics website: https://www.examtopics.com/exams/google/professional-data-engineer/view [Just to let you know, some of the answers on this website seem wrong, but the style is similar to the exam ones. You can also judge the correct solution based on the comments].
3. Use A Cloud Guru.
I found A Cloud Guru website helpful as it has a lot of preparation materials that go beyond the Qwicklabs videos and labs. Those include videos explaining GCP’s solutions, exam tips, mock exams, quizzes, labs, and sandbox cloud environments.
4. Try Pluralsight.
An alternative to A Cloud Guru is a learning platform called Pluralsight. It offers additional preparation videos as well as preparation quizzes.
5. Look out for patterns.
The exam usually follows specific patterns. For example, if the question states “time-series data in large size e.g in petabates”, you should probably look for an answer that has to do with BigTable. Also, if it mentions something about Hadoop or Spark, it will most likely have something to do with Dataproc.
6. Be cheap and lazy.
I was lucky enough that my company organized a fast-track course with a person from Google who was responsible for designing their training materials. One invaluable piece of advice he gave me is to have a “cheap and lazy” mindset during the exam. In other words, you should look for the answer that would potentially cost the least and take the lowest number of steps to complete. For example, you should probably use the coldline storage option instead of the nearline one for storing data that will accessed on a rare occasion. Another example is using an AutoML API instead of building a custom model in Tensorflow.
7. Use GCP solutions instead of 3rd party solutions.
Look out for answers that mention non-GCP tools. As this is a Google Cloud Platform qualification, they'll most likely prefer you to use their tools. For example, if the answer says Apache Beam or DataFlow, you should probably go with the latter.
8. Read the best practices on GCP.
If you have time, familiarise yourself with best practices of using GCP data solutions and go through the documentation if you’re unsure about specific concepts. The page with GCP’s best practices for storage3 can be found here:
https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/best-practices
9. Hands-on practice.
According to GCP’s website, it’s recommended to have 3+ years of industry experience, including 1+ years designing and managing solutions using Google Cloud to pass the exam. It is important to practice using the tools that you went through in the tutorial videos and documentation. You can get some hands-on experience via Qwicklab labs, A Cloud Guru labs, and sandbox cloud environment, or by signing up for a free tier account at GCP’s website. The link to sign up for a free GCP account can be found below:
10. Network with people who passed the exam.
The last point that I wanted to emphasise is to reach out to people who recently passed the Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer Certification exam. You will often find that they are helpful and may give you some additional preparation advice.
I hope you found this list helpful in bringing you one step closer to obtaining your qualification!
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