How to get the Neo4j Professional Certification

In this article I want to talk about my own experience to obtain the Neo4j Certification to recognize a knowledge of the main arguments of Neo4j, which I’ll talk more about below.

Certification arguments

First of all, let me explain the topics covered to pass the exam.

• Cypher queries: most of the exam is focused on Sql-like query language used by Neo4j to read / modify /create nodes and relations in graph, create constraint and indexes.
• Basic Neo4j Administration: that is how to managing a Neo4j databases, to import data, to know the main built-in procedures, to install plugins, etc…
• Tools used for development: that is how to use the principal tools used in Neo4j, of which I will speak later.
• Data modeling: namely how to create a graph data model and the graph modeling principles and best practices.

Graph Academy

The main resource to study for obtain the certification is surely the Graph Academy Courses.

The Graph Academy courses are structured very well. Every course is divided into several sections, and every section has a theoretical part and a practical part, and at the end of these, there are 3 multiple choice question to understand if you have learned the topic well.

In these courses, have been used the following tools:

• Neo4j Desktop: a very pleasant UI tool to manage local Neo4j databases.
• Neo4j Browser: another great UI tool to manage Neo4j executing cypher queries and visualizing graph datas.
• Neo4j Sandbox: which allows you to use Neo4j online with sample datasets without installing Neo4j locally.
• cypher-shell: a command-line tool to run queries in a terminal.

As indicated in Neo4j Certification main page, the basis for knowing the topics of exams is one of these free online training courses: Introduction to Neo4j 4.0 or Introduction to Neo4j 3.5.

The most obvious choice is the first one, unless you have a specific need to study the previous version. However, most of the chapters covered are very similar.

In this two courses, will be provided an overview of main tool used in Neo4j and a quite complete explanation of the Cypher query language.

Besides one of this two courses, there is the Data Model Courses needed to get the Certification. Just these days, for this part, they have added, besides this course , a new course specific for Neo4j 4.0.

The third course useful for passing the exam is the Neo4j Basic Administration. Also in this case there are two courses, one for Neo4j 4.0 and one for version 3.5. The course of 4.0 version it’s enough to pass the exam, however in the other course, at the moment, there are some additional parts not covered in the most recent course.

In addition to these courses, there are 2 interesting courses:

• Neo4j Graph Data Science: an introduction in graph data analysis and data science using Neo4j Sandbox and Python libraries as py2neo, pandas and Matplotlib.
• Applied Graph Alghoritms: an overview of the main algorithms used in neo4j explained with pratical examples using Neo4j Sandbox and Yelp dataset

Unfortunately these 2 courses don’t have the corresponding part of 4.0 version and doesn’t talk about the newer Graph Data Science Library but use the Neo4j Graph Algorithms library and, as we can see in the main page “The Graph Algorithms library has been deprecated” 😕

However, the courses are in continuous updating, so I’m confident that will be updated in the near future (in case of future additions, I’ll update this article).

In any case, this part is not covered by exam program, but probably it is expected in the future (maybe with another separated certification or in a unique exam for all the courses, who knows?).

Other useful study resource

Personally I focused principally on Graph Academy courses to get certified, but there are many other useful resources to deepen and understand better the arguments, in particular:

• Graph Databases: a book written by the creators of Neo4j, in which you’ll learn how to design and implement a graph database that brings the power of graphs.
• Learning Neo4j Book: another free book that cover a lot of Neo4j topics, with applied use cases, graph visualization tools, data modeling and more.
• Training events
• The Neo4j Cypher Manual: a complete documentation about the neo4j query language.
• Neo4j Webinars
• Youtube Neo4j Channel: if you prefer watch videos instead of reading, on Youtube, there are a lot of videos covering a lot of arguments.

Exam structure

Finally, let’s talk about the exam.

The first good news is that the test is completely free! 😄

There aren’t limit to number of attempts to pass the exam.

In any case, you can review the topics and retake the exam after a 24-hour period, so don’t worry!

The exam consist in 80 multiple choice questions that have to be completed in 60 minutes.

To pass the exam you have to answer correctly at least the 80% of the questions. However, I don’t know if any question have same score or if is weighted by difficulty, maybe yes or maybe not 🤔.

However, when you complete the exam (whether in case you passed it or not), you’ll come to a screen showing your results divided by category, so you can reinforce possible gaps in the categories.

To date, there is only one type of free Neo4j Certification available at neo4j.com, but as we can read to the main page, they are currently working on a more exhaustive certification program and on a different types of certification in the future.

After the completion

Then, if you exceeded the threshold of 80% of correct answer, will be sent to your email from certification@neo4j.com with your certification number and your Certification URL from graphacademy.neo4j.com to visualize and save the pdf certification.

After you achieved this certification, you can strengthen and deepen your knowledge with advanced, training sessions, offered exclusively to Neo4j Certified Professionals and you can can get access to monthly advanced training and live demos.

However, as mentioned previously, there are many other things to learn outside the certification, so don’t stop!! 💪 💪