How I passed the Google Certificate (Data Engineer) exam
Here I would like to share what and how I achieve this.
Yesterday I have passed online examination of Google Cloud Certified – Professional Data Engineer. This is my very first certificate in these 5 years or more. Here I would like to share what and how I achieve this.
Online Exam
Because I’m not live near the test centers now, so I decided to register online exam. When we have chosen this method, there are some rules and restrictions required.
First, I created my own account at https://webassessor.com/googlecloud and register the online exam (Remote-proctored). The date and time we selected is in our own timezone.
There are some requirements about system, programs, internet connection and a bit more. That time I need an external webcam because it requires biometrics profile plus I need to install the “Sentinel” program of this exam.
When it comes nearly to our exam schedule, it’s recommended to prepare before the time for at least 15 mins. The launch button will be appeared in the webaccessor site and we have to click to launch Sentinel. Before the exam begins, we will be asked from exam support to check our environments via the chat box in the program. Finally we will reach the serious time. As a result, we will receive a message of “Pass” or “Failed” only, we don’t know our scores.
Exam forecasts
For all 50 questions in the exam, we have to manage our 2 hours best. If we are not sure in some questions, don’t hesitate to click mark as review before going to next question. The button “Review all” in the program can lead us to a page showing all question numbers and our answers then we can back to the marked questions that have “*” to notice.
These are the lines I found in my exam
1. Migrating solutions
As far as I remembered, there are such 10 or 15 questions asking “Your company want to migrate this and that to GCP, how can you do?”. I feel these are fairly complex and not straightforward questions. We have to understand GCP products, what is each and how to apply them together to solve the case described in the questions.
2. Product features
Some are asking about “What is this?”. We have to well known about GCP products. Storages, Databases, ETL, and even IAM, all are in at least 1 question there.
This line is not quite difficult if we can differentiate each of products and when we use which.
3. Keywords
The questions are clear and we need to find keywords in them. For example, “non-developer”, “prefer to”, “cost-effective”, “mirroring servers”, and more can save us time to cut choices.
4. Code
Few questions relates to source codes, I think Google doesn’t want Data Engineers stick with how to implement source code rather than how to find and design solutions.
5. Memorizing
Very few questions require numbers or names. Mine are “6TB database”, “100 ms latency”, “us-west1-a”, and yes we just memorize only keywords of them to identify product characteristics, not all.
My preparations
I have finished many courses on Coursera and I recommend candidates to fulfill our own knowledge by whatever GCP courses before the exam especially GCP Professional skills courses. Also try attending workshop on Qwiklabs and we can faster get familiar with each GCP products.
Mine spent several days at the last before the exam schedule to re-study the Preparing for the Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer Exam course on Coursera. This course is such a good recap I think.
If you reader are looking for the GCP Certificate one, I hope you’re preparing well and get yours.