Google Cloud’s latest certification ‘Associate Data Practitioner’ is now generally available for those who missed the beta exam. After being envious of the flurry of announcements filling my LinkedIn feed of people passing the Beta exam version, I waited eagerly for the exam to become generally available and finally sat the exam last week.
This is my 11th Google Cloud certification, and the 3-year validity of associate exams is greatly welcome as this time of year is already chocker with renewals! Here are my thoughts on the new exam…
- What is the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner certification?
- Who is the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner certification aimed at?
- How difficult is the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner certification?
- How to prepare for and pass the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner exam
- Recommended training material and courses for Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner certification including practice exam question sources.
- Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner Exam Strategy and Tips
What is the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner certification?
Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner (ADP) is Google’s newest certification and their second at Associate level. Google offers three tiers of certification:
- Foundational e.g. Cloud Digital Leader.
- Associate e.g. Associate Data Practitioner and Associate Cloud Engineer.
- Professional e.g. Security Engineer, Data Engineer, Network Engineer, DevOps Engineer etc.
The foundational Google Cloud certification covers a broader range of concepts, including general cloud knowledge, without requiring hands-on experience. Associate-level certifications demand some hands-on experience with various Google Cloud services. Conversely, Professional-level certifications delve into specialized areas (like data, security, or DevOps), requiring deeper expertise and significant hands-on experience within that specific domain.
As per Google’s definition:
The Associate Data Practitioner secures and manages data on Google Cloud. This individual has experience using Google Cloud data services for tasks like data ingestion, transformation, pipeline management, analysis, machine learning, and visualization. Candidates have a basic understanding of cloud computing concepts like infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS).
The Associate Data Practitioner exam assesses your ability to:
- Prepare and ingest data
- Analyse and present data
- Orchestrate data pipelines
- Manage data
Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner Badge
Who is the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner certification aimed at?
The Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner is an intermediate level certification, aimed at professionals working within Google Cloud’s data space. It acts as a good stepping stone for those who are fairly new to the role, and lacking the experience and in-depth knowledge required for the Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer certification.
How difficult is the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner certification?
Whilst this certification is an intermediate/associate level certification, it is still challenging and requires hands on experience working with the Google Cloud data ecosystem including pipelines, orchestration and visualisation. The exam does not go particularly deep in any of these areas, but if you do not have day to day experience working with the majority of the products highlighted in the exam guide you may struggle.
For those with the Professional Data Engineer (PDE) certification, adding Associate Data Practitioner should not be too challenging provided you have experience with, Data Fusion and an understanding of core machine learning concepts.
How to prepare for and pass the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner exam
Below are my recommendations on how best to prepare for the Associate Data Practitioner exam based on my experiences with this and other Google Cloud certifications. My one caveat to highlight is I sat the ADP exam shortly after passing the Professional Machine Learning Engineer, and recertifying the Professional Data Engineer certifications, so a lot of the content was already fresh in memory and I only had to focus on areas that I was less familiar with i.e. Looker and Data Fusion,
Before starting, thoroughly review the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner exam guide. This will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses across the exam topics and focus your training efforts on the areas where you feel least confident.
The exam guide consists of four sections, providing a weighted percentage for each. These sections are:
- Section 1: Data Preparation and Ingestion (~30% of the exam)
- Section 2: Data Analysis and Presentation (~27% of the exam)
- Section 3: Data Pipeline Orchestration (~18% of the exam)
- Section 4: Data Management (~25% of the exam)
The exam guide indicates 50-60 questions within a 2-hour time limit. However, my exam included only 40 multiple-choice questions. While some were straightforward, others required practical, hands-on knowledge. That being said, it took around 50 minutes to complete the exam and despite not felling like I needed to review any questions, I was still as unsure of passing when submitting the exam as with every other exam!
The exam covers a vast array of Google Cloud products in the data space including:
- BigQuery
- BigQuery analytics hub
- Dataproc
- Dataflow
- PubSub
- Composer
- Workflows
- Scheduler
- CloudSQL
- Data fusion
- Gemini
- Looker
- Machine Learning
A considerable proportion of questions focussed heavily on BigQuery or on data pipelines and knowing when Dataproc vs Dataflow vs Data Fusion and what workflow orchestration tool to use in particular scenarios.
Prior to sitting the exam, one question I had was how difficult is this exam going to be if I already hold the Professional Data Engineer exam, and whether I would need to do any more preparation. I had read various posts from people who had sat the beta exam, and completed the practice exam from Google Cloud. Both of these (plus the official exam guide) highlighted Looker and Data Fusion as two products within the exam- neither of which I had any hands-on experience with.
Whilst I knew of the products, and at a high level the functionality and features of each, it was clear I would have to improve my understanding of these two prior to the exam. These became my focus area prior to scheduling the exam. Preparation included reading Google Cloud product documentation and intro videos, before proceeding to CloudSkillsBoost to identify suitable courses including hands on labs. Having completed these and feeling more experienced having played with both in lab environments, I scheduled the exam.
Whilst there is a course preparation for ADP on CloudSkillsBoost, I had recertified my PDA exam in November and certified in Machine Learning Engineer in December so I was hoping that collectively I would have the relevant experience from real world engagements and those two previous exams to pass the ADP exam.
Whilst it is possible to pass the exams without real world experience, it is much easier to pass them if you are working with the products day to day rather than relying on theoretical knowledge. This has definitely been the case for me as I continue with iterative professional certification renewals.
Recommended training material and courses for Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner certification including practice exam question sources.
- Google Cloud Skills Boost learning path Associate Data Practitioner Learning Path
- Google Cloud Skills Boost Looker and Data Fusion specific courses and labs
- Google Cloud Documentation
- Google Cloud Solutions
- Priyanka Vergadia aka The Cloud Girl
Google Cloud Skills Boost Learning Path: Associate Data Practitioner Learning Path
Google Cloud Skills Boost Associate Data Practitioner Learning Path is an online self-paced training course. The content is presented in a series of eight courses covering the areas included within the exam guide, and a series of Quests providing lab scenarios for you to practice and gain hands-on experience. Each course has several modules consisting of a series of videos, labs and an end of module quiz to assess your understanding of the content covered.
For gaining some experience with Looker and Data Fusion, I also completed the following courses, labs and challenges:
- Prepare Data for Looker Dashboards and Reports
- Looker Data Explorer - Qwik Start
- Filtering and Sorting Data in Looker
- Merging Results from Different Explores in Looker
- Looker Functions and Operators
- Filtering and Sorting Data in Looker
- Prepare Data for Looker Dashboards and Reports: Challenge Lab
- Getting Started with Cloud Data Fusion
The platform also enables you to play the videos at a faster speed, enabling you to reduce the time to complete the course and speed through areas you are already familiar with.
Google Cloud Documentation
I am a big fan of Google Cloud Documentation. There is documentation for each Google product, providing overviews, getting started guides, code samples, and the Cloud Architecture Framework and Cloud Architecture Center for further guidance and best practices.
Reading the associated product documentation pages after completing training courses helps to further consolidate your knowledge and clarify any points you may still be struggling with.
Google Cloud Solutions
Google Cloud Solutions provides a vast range of QuickStart’s and tutorials to guide you through and provide hands on experience with Google Cloud’s products and services. These tutorials prove invaluable providing additional experience working with some of the services you may be less familiar with.
Priyanka Vergadia aka The Cloud Girl
For those who benefit more from visual learning- Priyanka Vergadia aka The Cloud Girl has created an excellent collection of sketchnotes covering a wide range of Google Cloud products, services, and concepts in an easy to digest format.
Example sketchnote for How to build a scalable data analytics pipeline from Priyanka Vergadia
The sketchnotes have been released as a book titled Visualising Google Cloud which is a handy reference for getting to grips with Google Cloud’s products and concepts for any Google Cloud exams. It is also a handy reference to have for day-to-day use as you are learning more about Google Cloud’s offerings.
Priyanka regularly posts videos on her social media channels including various Cloud Bytes videos covering Google Cloud products in under a minute and has her own blog on Medium.
Review the exam guide (yes, again!)
Once you have completed all the training materials, review the exam guide again. This time you should feel more confident in your level of knowledge for each topic. If there are still topics in the guide you do not feel comfortable with, spend more time focussing on these, revisiting the content in the training courses, or researching the content in Google docs, and YouTube videos etc.
Take the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner practice exam
Once you are feeling confident you understand all the concepts covered in the exam guide, it is time to do a practice exam. Google provides a free practice exam consisting of ~20 questions to mimic the type of question you may see on the exam.
Complete the practice exam as a closed book exercise- do not allow yourself to search for answers, or review study material prior to answering. It is key to see how well you are performing and highlight areas of weakness you may need to improve prior to booking the real exam.
At the end of the practice exam, review all the questions including those you have got right and read the feedback provided by Google for each answer. This feedback clarifies why a particular answer is correct, and why others are incorrect, further consolidating your understanding of the subject. For any answers you are still unclear about, or if you feel the feedback does not help you to understand why a particular answer is correct, spend more time revisiting the associated topic on one of the available training platforms or YouTube videos.
Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner Exam Strategy and Tips
Perform the first iteration of the exam quickly, answering the questions you are confident you know the answer for. If you do not know the answer to a question, mark it for review at the end and try to rule out any incorrect answers from those available. Typically, there are a couple of answers that may be correct, however a subtle word within the question usually makes one of the answers a better fit than the others.
Once you complete your first iteration, review your marked questions, and spend more time on them accordingly. By taking this approach, you can determine how long you can spend your remaining time on these tougher questions as you know how many you marked for review. You may also get lucky and find a later question on the exam helps you to identify the answer to a previous question you were unsure on either directly or indirectly by triggering a memory of some detail that earlier escaped you!
Upon completion of the exam, a provisional pass or fail is displayed on the screen. Look out for it, if it is your first Google Cloud certification you can quite easily miss it as for whatever reason, it is not highlighted particularly well! Google subsequently confirms the pass/failure within 7-10 days’ time (although it is often sooner!).
How to book the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner exam
Google Cloud have recently changed the method of booking exams- you can no longer go direct to the WebAssessor website to book the exam. Instead, you need to register an account with CertMetric. You then access WebAssessor via CertMetrics using single sign-on (SSO). The exam can be taken in a test centre, or via a remote proctored exam monitored via a web camera and microphone.
Kryterion Test Centres Logo
Since covid I have been taking advantage of the remote proctored exams for convenience. The nearest test centre to me was around 1 hour away. There are a various system requirements for online proctoring. This includes installing a secure browser application, and disabling various components that may interfere with the remote proctoring such as firewalls, anti-virus, pop up blockers etc. For this reason, Kryterion recommends you use a personal device for the exam. There is a system checker available to test internet speed, microphone, and webcam functionality here.
Kryterion requires you to enrol in biometrics and create a biometrics profile which is used to identify yourself digitally based on facial characteristics. Each time you launch an exam, a biometric check is performed to validate you match your biometric profile. You can launch the remote proctored exam 10 minutes before your scheduled exam time. However, during busy times you may find you are waiting around for up to 30 minutes for a proctor to join and ‘secure the testing environment.’ This consists of displaying your government issued ID to the proctor, and then providing a 360-degree view of the room, and your clear desk to the proctor.
Once they are happy the room is secure, your exam is started. The proctor monitors you via the webcam and microphone and will pause the exam if there are any issues and contact you via the secure browser chat functionality. This has happened to me once when the proctor advised my video stream had stopped working mid-exam. The exam was paused whilst my laptop restarted, and the proctor verified the stream was working again.
On a second occasion, the proctor advised my video stream was not working before the exam had started- a reboot failed to resolve the issue, and I was advised to contact Kryterion support. This wasn’t the greatest start to the exam, as I was now past my scheduled start time, however support were able to reschedule the exam to begin as soon as I had finished troubleshooting the issue with them, or I could book it for another day if it was no longer convenient.
It is best to book your exam ahead of time, as this gives you a date to work towards completing study and revision and helps ensure you get to choose a date/time that suits you best. If you leave booking the exam until after you finish your studying, you may find there are not as many convenient times available as you would like. If you find yourself in this position, check back regularly as I have seen a lot of times that were not available when checking the previous day, become available a day or two later. Provided you give at least 24 hours’ notice, you are free to reschedule your exam to another time if for any reason you are not ready.
How long is the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner exam?
The Associate Data Practitioner exam is a two-hour exam during which you will need to answer 50-60 multiple choice and multiple select questions (the exam guide states 50-60, but my exam consisted of 40 questions!).
For myself, I completed the exam within 50 minutes and on this occasion did not need to flag any questions for later review.
How long is the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner certification valid?
All Google Cloud Associate level certifications are valid for 3 years. You can recertify 60 days prior to certification expiration.
How much does the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner exam cost?
The Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner exam costs $125 USD.
Thanks for taking the time to read this blog, I hope you find it useful in preparing for the Google Cloud Associate Data Practitioner certification. Please feel free to share, subscribe to be alerted to future posts, follow me on LinkedIn, and react/comment below!
If you are new to Google Cloud certifications, or you are deciding what certification to do next, check out my other blog posts covering: