How to pass the Blue Prism Certification Exam — Webcast Video & Transcript

Rob King: Good afternoon everybody. My name is Rob King and I’m your host at today’s RPA Academy webinar. Today’s topic is How to Pass the Blue Prism Certification Exam. And I’ll be introducing our panel of experts very shortly.

Just to kick it off, a quick introduction to the RPA Academy. The RPA Academy provides technical training and business training in all types of RPA products. We do on-demand, classroom and instructor-led online training that can be tailored to your specific needs or to the certification exams, which brings us round to our topic today.

I’m going to introduce our panel. Our first member of the panel is Azim Zicar. Azim, would you like to introduce yourself?

Azim: Yes, thanks Rob. Hi everyone, my name is Azim and I have been doing RPA for just over two and a half years now. I’ve got experience in retail mainly and now I work for a leading IT consultancy.

Experienced in UiPath and Blue Prism, I’m a certified Blue Prism and UiPath developer, being a Professional Certified Developer in Blue Prism. And I’m an instructor here at the RPA academy as well.

And I’m looking forward to this session.

Rob King: Thank you Azim. Our second panelist today is Arun Potta. Arun, would you like to say hello to everyone?

Arun: Hey guys, my name is Arun and I have little over eight years of experience in RPA, I have over two and a half years, close to three years and I’m a certified Blue Prism developer and Solutions Designer.

Welcome to today’s session.

Rob King: Thank you guys. Our third panelist unfortunately can’t make it today. Tholang Mathopa has had some technical difficulties in joining the call, but we’re okay, we’ve got her elements covered, but thank you to Tholang who would have also been one of our expert panelists today.

Our panel is quite an international panel. We’ve got Arun contacting us from Toronto, and Azim is contacting us from just up the road from me in Birmingham, in the UK.

So, to kick off today’s webinar, we’re going to start with, ‘how do you actually sign up and get started for the Blue Prism exam?’ And for this, I’m going to hand over control to Azim, who’s going to walk you through these steps.

Azim: Thank you very much Rob.

Azim: So, the first thing that I’d like to cover is the Blue Prism portal. So, if you have begun your journey with RPA or Blue Prism specifically, the first thing I would definitely suggest that you do is go to portal.blueprism.com. This is something I’d recommend to anyone that wants to get involved with Blue Prism.

First, create an account. You don’t need to be part of a company, that’s a partner with Blue Prism or has paid for a Blue Prism license and things like that. You can just sign up as an individual and then you’ll be able to access Blue Prism.

Obviously, there are different levels of access within the portal and that will depend on who you work for and whether you are a private person that signed up or if your company is a partner or something like that.

So, this is my portal, I’m already logged in and these are the things that I have access to. What you will notice is if the company you work for doesn’t have certain access, you won’t be able to see certain things here, but I will cover things that you can see and the things that you can do before having full access to it.

So, you will see the forums, you just won’t have certain functionality within the forums, but nonetheless, still very helpful place to go because you can have a look at the questions and answers on there, which is something that other vendors have as well. It’s very helpful, even if you’re just reading and educating yourself in RPA, quite important.

And obviously, this section here, current releases and things like that, that would be if you have that level of access, so you may not see all of that. And then you’ve got the documents section. This is the most important section in your RPA journey or your Blue Prism journey.

Blue Prism is quite good in their documentation and they provide you with all the documents that you need to learn Blue Prism to a certain extent, as I mentioned a moment ago, and basically be able to get some assistance when it comes to doing some type of development with certain special software like mainframe and things like that.

And then obviously the support, again, it depends on the level of access learning. And when you sign up to the Blue Prism portal, you will also have access to this LMS (Learning Management System). Now the courses within Blue Prism.

So, the LMS basically is supposed to give you a nice overview of your profile and things you’ve done. I mean, these courses here, they are the courses that you will get to enroll for free. There is not a lot there, unfortunately, but it’s still something at the end of the day and you can go in here and you’ll be able to see all the different things.

Now, whenever you do any courses and you pass any exams, previously what used to happen, you would come in here, go to external training and then you would see the course that you’ve passed in here. As you can see, I did my Blue Prism Developer exam in May last year and it’s come up here. So, that’s what you used to be able to do and then you would download a certificate from here.

But now, they have replaced it with the badges, which is something you’ve probably all seen. So, Blue Prism has stopped doing certificates and they now issue badges through acclaim instead, so you won’t get a certificate anymore from them and you get a badge instead.

So, that’s a very, very brief summary of the portal and I’ll go more in detail on the next topic that I’ll cover, as to how you prepare for the exam using the information on the portal. So far so good.

The next important thing that you need to do is to sign yourself up with Pearson VUE. Now, Pearson VUE, I’m sure you guys are aware of them — they’re an independent company and Blue Prism uses them to leverage their exam centers, so that you can go and take your Blue Prism exam there.

Now, this is my way of finding the Blue Prism Pearson VUE, you guys will probably laugh, but what I normally do is just Blue Prism and then Pearson VUE because I’m not going to go to Pearson VUE and search for Blue Prism, I just use Google, Google is your friend or Bing in this instance.

And then we’ll get to the link (https://home.pearsonvue.com/blueprism) You want to be in Pearson VUE. And in here, it will list all of the different certifications that you can sign up for Blue Prism.

So, this is the only way to sign up for official Blue Prism exams. Once you’ve done your foundation course, which is something we’re offering in the RPA Academy, when you’re ready, you go in here to book your exam and then you go and take your exam in a Pearson VUE center.

So, obviously the important thing to remember here is that you need to be sure that you have created a Blue Prism account first and you have a portal account before you go into creating a Pearson VUE account, so that it links up. It then asks you for your details and then your Blue Prism portal ID.

Now, one thing I noticed is when I signed up first time is that I had to wait 24 hours for Pearson VUE and Blue Prism to sync up because I was putting my portal ID in there, it just wasn’t having it. So, I recommend doing your portal ID right now. There is nothing to lose, so go for it. And after 24 hours, try and register immediately, hopefully that works. If it doesn’t, wait 24 hours, don’t panic and it should work for you.

And this is what the Pearson VUE account looks like. So, you can see a history of your exam. So, as you can see, I’ve done my two exams here. <screen shot this> And really, you need to make sure on your Pearson VUE account, that you put your legal name.

That’s my legal name and I have an internet name, just to make things complicated. But, make sure you use your legal information because they verify your ID or your government ID before you can take the exam to make sure the right person is taking the exam.

So, I’m hoping this gives a bit of an overview on these two things. And there is a lot to see in the portal and everything else, there are the costs for your exam and things like that. So, when you’re learning, you’re always going to this section here, which is a great place to start and you go to certification.

I’ll cover this in a moment; I’m hoping that helps out on in answering the question of how you sign up to the portal and how you sign up to Pearson VUE and things like that.

So, Rob I’m hoping I have covered everything. Was there anything else I need to cover for this topic before moving to the next one?

Rob King: That was fantastic. Thanks for that. I guess just for our audience, before you continue is you all should be able to ask questions and we’ll pose those questions to our panelists at the end of the session.

So, if you do have any questions on signing up or any of the topics we’re going to cover today, then please just push those questions through and I’ll be sure to pose them to our expert panel at the very end of this session.

So yes, thank you for that run through, that was terrific and double thank you because you filled in at the last minute to run that section for us. For your actual section there, which is topic number two, which is getting ready for the exam… what advice do you have for our audience today?

Azim: Oh, thank you very much Rob. So, in regards to getting ready for the exam, as I’ve already mentioned, signing up to the portal is the important part of all of this, of your RPA or Blue Prism journey. The next important part is using the information on the portal for getting ready.

Now, when we’re talking about the exams or specifically talking about the Blue Prism foundation or Blue Prism developer exam, we’ll probably touch on the Blue Prism professional developer exam as well. Now, the first thing that you need to remember is if you want to be a Blue Prism certified developer, you won’t fully find the information you need on the portal.

You would need to take that course and that’s something we offer here at the RPA Academy because there is a specific training that you need to go through that Blue Prism provides to the training partners, which the RPA Academy is, so it’s very important that you do that. And then you go to the portal to get your peripheral documents in preparation.

So the section ‘Learning and Certification’ (https://portal.blueprism.com/learning/certification) is a really good section to start. It’s got a lot of information here that you need, besides the certificate specific information. Like I said, I can’t cover all of the courses, so today I’ll focus mainly on the Blue Prism developer exam.

For the Blue Prism foundation developer exam, I would go to the developer certification path actually. And this gives you a very nice overview of what you need to do to get to this exam. And these are your main steps.

And as you can see, these things on the left side, you can do the practical product training, that’s the foundation course and is your second step in getting ready for your developer certification. And that’s something that you can’t do yourself through the portal, you have to go through a training partner like the RPA Academy.

If we look specifically at the Blue Prism developer Exam… for every exam that Blue Prism gives you, they will give you the information you need and what you need to learn to be able to pass that exam.

And as you can see, there is a scope in here and that covers all of the things you need to know. Before booking your exam, you must read this. If you read this and you don’t know some of it, please take some more time before you take the exam to make sure you’ve covered everything.

As you can see, in terms of preparation, you need to successfully complete the developer foundation training. That is a vital part of this. Sorry, I keep repeating myself, but there is a reason why I say it, that is a crucial part in your RPA journey. Not only will it help you with Blue Prism, but with all of the RPA tools because the way Blue Prism has documented it, as you can see, it’s pretty neat and they have done things in a methodical way. So, follow the program and you’ll find yourself in a successful RPA career.

Now, the developer foundation, obviously that’s not in the portal, but these guides are. So, after you’ve done your training, before you prepare for the exam, this one specifically, the exception-handling guide is something that’s covered quite a bit.

I’m sure Arun will touch on this in his section, but if you’re looking for a guide, you just take that information from there and go into documents. Sometimes what’s written on that guidance document may not match exactly, so what you have to do is just put one word instead. So, let’s enter ‘Exception Handling guide’ and just search for it.

And as you can see, there is indeed an exception-handling guide in here. For some reason this one is a Spanish one. But yeah, they’re constantly changing their documentation and updating it. It could be that this advanced exception is part of that.

So you see what I’ve just mentioned about the naming? Don’t get too stuck on the exact naming because there may not be something with the exact name, but that is the document that they mean. So this is how you get to your documents.

Now with regards to the Professional Developer, it’s pretty much the same formula. Although there isn’t a lot of information on that regarding the professional developer, they do give you all of the guides in there.

Again, that is why the RPA Academy is here. We come in and people that have done it, like myself, would be walking you through the different things that are covered in this exam because you will have these guides on the portal, but what you won’t have is real life experience that is shared with you and also the different things that you will need to remember because one of the things that they mentioned quite a bit on the exam is to do with Java, which Arun will cover.

If you haven’t been practicing or talking about these things, the information won’t stick. So, that’s kind of how you prepare for your exam.

In summary, to prepare for your Developer Exam, you need to make sure you do your foundation course through a training academy like us. And for the Professional Developer and other trainings, there’s information there but I wouldn’t recommend that you just go with that, I recommend that you go with that experience and also, if you can, do one of our courses where we can help you solidify the information before you take your exam.

Hopefully, this helps you a bit in terms of preparing for the exam. Rob, I’m hoping that that covers it. If there’s anything else, please let me know.

Rob King: Yes, thank you very much. And if there any questions, please do pass them along and we’ll give them to Azim at the end of this session. I’m going to switch back presenters now, so hopefully you can see my screen.

And topic number three, we’re going to hand over to Arun to talk about the actual format of the exam. So, after you’ve signed up, you’ve done your prep, what happens next? Over to you Arun.

Arun: All right, so coming to the format of the exam… it’s pretty simple. There are going to be 60 questions and you have exactly 60 minutes, unless you’re from a non-English speaking country, you get extra 30 minutes in that case.

The requirement is to get at least 70% marks to clear the exam. So it’s important to keep track of your time and not to waste too much time on a single question. For the AD01, which is the developer exam, the first level, you can flag the question and then you can come back to that later in the exam if you feel like you’re not too confident about it. It’s important to keep track of the time and prepare yourself well in advance.

My suggestion would be to go through each chapter to try to understand the concept. There are not going to be straightforward questions right out of the book. Like any other certification exam, your understanding of the subject would be tested here.

You will be given questions on a situational basis. Let’s say, there is a flow depicted in the exam, so you’ll be given a flow and asked, “What would be the result of the flow” Or “Where would the stage end at?”

And there will be multiple-choice questions, so one out of four might be correct or they may even ask you to select two or three options which are true to that particular statement. Or a simple true or false statement can also be given. You have to be prepared for all of these things.

And on top of this, you need to pay more attention to the chapters review notes, as well as the notes section which is within each chapter. You have to pay a little more attention. There may be few questions, maybe 10–15 questions depending on the day that you take the exam.

If you’re lucky, you can get at least 15 questions out of the book, but rest of them would be testing your understanding skills. So, that’s about the format of the exam.

Does anybody have any questions? Or Rob, do you have anything else specifically with regards to the format?

Rob King: Not regarding the format, I’m going to take back control and move on to our next topic, which is related to the exam. And really, just to ask you all the question what advice you would give to people who are preparing for the exam?

Since Arun… you were there last, what advice would you give to anyone who’s looking to start?

Arun: All right, for anybody who would be ready to take the exam, I would say they should have enough practice, at least two to three months of practice with the tool and if not, at least 25–30 days of practice in each exercise.

They should be ready to complete the consolidation exercise, which should involve all the exception handling and preparing a release or seeing the control room locks, everything should be in place in perfect order. If you have done that in one go, then you’re good to take the exam.

So, it is going to test right from the start to the end of the foundation course. It covers almost all the topics. And once you do that consolidation exercise, you should feel confident about yourself saying ‘Yeah, I can take this exam!’

I would suggest one takes the time to understand each concept rather than regurgitate what’s in the book. I mean, not too many of those are going to come in the exam.

Rob King: Thank you, that’s some good advice. We’ve started to get some questions coming through which I’m going to come back to in a moment. But before we do that, I want to hand it back over to Azim. Azim, what advice would you give to anyone who’s preparing for the exam?

Azim: Yeah Rob, pretty much what Arun has said is my kind of view as well. Don’t get bogged down on the theory because the questions they ask you in the exam don’t really test your memory, they do test your knowledge. So, make sure you’re well founded and confident.

So, the first thing I would say is, if you don’t feel confident that you can pass it, don’t bother booking it. There is no rush, follow the program that Blue Prism has set and stick to it. And if they have said (after doing the course) to wait three to six months or practice three to six months, follow that schedule, there is a reason why it’s said. And then you will take the exam, you’ll be more confident and you’ll pass.

Even till today, certain things if you ask me specifically, will escape my memory i.e. I’d have to go into Blue Prism and look. And that’s because maybe I don’t do that thing very often and that’s the type of thing that could happen to you on the test.

Something you don’t do very often will come up and because you don’t do it often or because you haven’t had enough practice, you won’t remember it and you won’t be able to answer and time is very limited. Practice makes perfect, and be confident, then take the test.

Rob King: Good advice. So, I’m not sure who wants to answer this question, so I’ll put it out to both of you. The first question that we’ve got is, ‘do any of the questions have negative marking?’

Arun: No, no questions will be awarded a negative mark, so you’re good to select an option and then pray if that’s good. Don’t worry about selecting the wrong option; there are no negative marks.

Rob King: So, you’re better off taking a guess if you’re not sure.

Arun: Yeah.

Rob King: A second question has come through and I’m not sure if anybody can do this in the time of we have… ‘can you show a couple of sample questions to the audience?’

Arun: Well, let me try that out, while you guys discuss… let me look for a sample question.

Rob King: That’s great. So, I’ve got another question for you. And Azim, this one actually relates to the document that you brought up. So, when you brought up the documents on the screen, it said version 6.2 and I believe the current version is 6.4, ‘how frequently are documents updated to sort of keep in line with the current version of the actual software?’

‘And how up to date is the exam to keep up to date with the current version of the software?’

Azim: That’s a very good question. Actually, when I was preparing for the Professional Developer exam, it did say on there, that there won’t be Version 6 specific questions, so the exam has probably not yet been updated to Version 6. Although, one thing you have to note with Blue Prism is that the core concept is the same throughout the versions it’s had, but obviously there has been small changes here and there.

One of the examples is, on Version 6, in the exception handling stage; they added a native function to take screenshots automatically when there is an error. That’s not something that was in Version 5. And when the changes are small like that, they don’t really overrule the whole documentation, but they are quite good in version controlling things.

So, especially when it comes to releases and things that really affect the version… surface automation was majorly changed on Version 6, so they have updated that document, but from Version 5 and before that, you won’t really see many changes because there weren’t major changes. Version 6 really did bring major changes. So, keep an eye for the exam changing.

Now, with the RPA Academy being a training partner, we get up-to-date documentation and Blue Prism is very good at updating the training documentation. So, you can be sure that when going with an authorized training partner, you’re always going to get the relevant training for your exam.

Rob King: Thank you. That was a good and thorough answer. How are you getting on Arun?

Arun: Rob, I’m trying to bring up a sample question, give me a moment.

Rob King: That’s fine. We’ve got one other question I’ll slip in. The question is ‘for Blue Prism, is there a Community Edition or a trial version that can be used for learning?’

Azim: No, unfortunately Blue Prism has not got that yet. Although, I have heard that there might be something coming up, so I guess we’ll wait and see, but as of right now, no, there isn’t.

Rob King: Okay. Well, we are in our closing few minutes of the webinar, so nothing like a bit of pressure, but Arun, are we good to switch over to you?

Arun: Yeah Rob.

Rob King: The screen is yours.

Arun: All right. So, this is one of the sample questions that is available on the Blue Prism portal, you can expect similar kind of questions in the exam. This one asks you, “The following object design has been created. The create orders processes uses the following actions; Launch, Log in, Main Menu, Logout, Get Order Details, Create Order. How many of the actions contained within the ERP Business Object will be consumed into memory when the Create Order Process is run?’’

So, in this case, each action will be consumed into memory as it’s called. You will be asked similar questions, so let’s move on and see another sample. This is another sample question. Not a lot of straightforward questions, you will be given a scenario and your understanding would be tested, like this.

Rob King: And you only have a minute effectively per question?

Arun: Yes.

Rob King: That’s a really good example of the depth of knowledge and experience that you need to have for the exam.

Arun: Yes.

Rob King: Thank you very much for the examples. We’ve unfortunately run out of time, but I do appreciate all of your input from our panel. Thank you also for filling in at short notice, as we had a last minute drop out. I think the information there was fantastic. We’re going to share the information out on all the normal social media channels, so please do look out for that.

And please do follow us on newsletters and on the website for more information in terms of what’s going on. Thank you. And with that, we’ll close the webinar. Thank you guys and thank you everybody for listening.

Presenters: Edward Brooks, Founder of The RPA Academy
Rob King, VP of Product Development at The RPA Academy
Azim Zicar, RPA Consultant
Tholang Mathopa, RPA Trainer and Consultant, The RPA
Academy
Arun Potta, RPA Trainer and Consultant, The RPA Academy