Last week I sat the Alteryx Designer Core Certification exam and failed with an overall mark of 69%. My first piece of advice is don't be scared to fail as it gives you the opportunity to learn from your mistakes, helping you to improve in the long run.
In this blog post I will go through:
- How to prepare for the exam
- What to expect during the exam
- Top tips for passing
How to prepare for the exam
- Take the time to read through the Alteryx Designer Core Certification Exam Prep Guide - this provides a useful overview of the exam and gives guidance on how to prepare. (https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/ayx.policies/Core+Certification+Exam+Prep+Guide.pdf)
- Do as many basic Alteryx weekly challenges as you can - this is a great way to build your understanding of the different tools assessed during the exam.
- Take the practice test - this only has 15 questions but gives you a feel for the type of questions that will come up during the exam. It also provides an explanation of why the answers are correct, so you can continue learning while testing. (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Exam-Prep/Core-Cert-Practice-Test/ta-p/401575)
What to expect during the exam
- You are given 2 hours to complete 80 multiple choice questions - 7 of these are practical questions that require you to download a dataset and create a workflow to find the answer.
- The exam is open book - this means you can use Google, use any notes you have and make use of the exam prep guide.
- The standard multiple choice questions count as 1 mark; the practical questions count as 3 marks. It's important to keep in mind that some of the multiple choice questions require you to ‘select all that apply’ - for these types of questions partial points are deducted for incorrect selections.
- At the end of the exam, you will get your results immediately and your certificate will be emailed to you with a breakdown of how you performed in each category.
Top tips for passing:
- Work as quickly as you can - roughly spend 1.5 minutes answering the multiple choice questions and 4/5 minutes on the practical questions.
- Make sure that you answer the exam questions in order. If you get stuck on a question flag it and move on - you can return to your flagged questions later.
- Make sure that you read each question carefully as some of the questions will try and trip you up.
- Make sure you open Alteryx Designer before starting the exam.
- Have the help pages of the tools assessed during the exam open in your browser for quick referral - these can be found on the Alteryx website.
- Use Google to quickly check an answer if you are unsure.
I hope you find this blog post useful. Good luck in your exam!
