The Tableau Certification of Desktop Qualified Exam is much sought after by visual analytics enthusiasts. It is a valuable certification to boost career opportunities and present to the world, your expert competency in the area.
Most candidates who have taken the exams successfully suggest serious study for 10-14 days before the exam, at a rate of 2 hours per day. Interestingly, the level of ease or toughness one feels about the exam varies widely from candidate to candidate. While a few clear the exam in the first attempt itself, there are a large number who need a couple or more chances in spite of spending around 2 years working with Tableau tools. The exam simply aims to test a candidate’s familiarity with Tableau.
Here’s a quick fire guide to prepare for the exam with ease:
Identify Level of Skills
The first step to cracking the exam is to answer the 14 sample questions on the Tableau official preparation guide (Link) in order to measure your Tableau skills. These skills are divided into:
– Advanced level
if you can answer all questions correctly within 30 minutes,
– Medium level
if you can answer all questions correctly within 1 hour,
– Beginner level
if you can answer fewer than 10 out of 14 questions correctly.
If you are a beginner-level candidate, you are strongly recommended to download the Tableau On-Demand videos (Link) first and go through the sample workbooks on Tableau Desktop before getting in depth into complex customized calculations. However, if you are an advanced level candidate, it makes sense to familiarize yourself with the new features of Tableau Desktop 9 before taking the exam as Desktop 9 provides quite a lot of innovative new features that allow complex calculations.
Make a Plan
After the skills level is determined, it makes sense for you to make a plan that will help you enhance the knowledge of Tableau. Ideally, a candidate with medium level skills in Tableau should be familiar with connecting and sorting the data, and creating simple calculation fields. With only resources available on the Tableau site, you can make an exhaustive study plan:
- Top 15 Level of Details (Link)
You can start with building the visualization by referring to this video. To ensure you have no gaps in learning, you should ideally build the visualization again one day before your exam, this time without referring to the methods mentioned in the video.
- Next step is to Sort the data within one category. (Link)
- Next, learn the techniques of Filtering Top N (Link)
- Next step: Learn how to use Set in Tableau: (Link)
- Master how to create a Paretos Chart (Link)
- Study how to use Ad-hoc Analytics and save it (Link)
- How to use the secondary calculation of ‘Edit table calculation’
- Learn about troubleshooting of mixing aggregation functions and non-aggregation together Link)
- Automatic split and custom split (Link)
Tableau Certification: Exam Day Preparation
On D-Day, it is strongly recommended for candidates who the use Mac version of Tableau to practice building dashboards on Windows as the virtual machine for the exam is Windows. The other key is to expose yourself to the real environment of the exam.
Edureka has a specially curated Tableau Course which covers various concepts of data visualization in-depth, including conditional formatting, scripting, linking charts, dashboard integration, Tableau integration with R, and more. New batches are starting soon.
This blog is a modified version of the blog “How to Prepare for Tableau Desktop 9 Qualified Associate Exam” by Eva Y Feng.