As a freshly minted Tableau Server Certified Professional, I thought you might want to hear my thoughts on how to ace this grueling exam. For those new to Tableau certifications, there are two levels of Tableau Desktop certification and two levels of Tableau Server certification:
- Qualified Associate
- Certified Professional
The Qualified Associate (or “QA”) exams are multiple-choice exams and can be completed by someone who has spent three to six months with the respective product. In other words, they demonstrate knowledge but not necessarily experience.
The Certified Professional exams, on the other hand, are a way of establishing your comprehensive mastery of the product, so they are designed with real-world scenarios in an open-ended format. You have to prove that you know not only how to achieve something with the tool, but also that you know the best practices for achieving that thing.
Now, I’m prohibited from sharing any specifics about the exam itself: questions, formats, etc. Mercifully, Tableau has made much of this information public in the form of the super-useful Server Certified Professional Exam Guide. Building from that, then, let me see if I can share useful tips and tricks that won’t get me in hot water with the powers that be...I give you “Matthew’s Five Tips to Ace the Server Certified Professional Exam”:
Tip #1: Google-fu
As with the other Tableau exams, you are allowed to use the internet during the exam. This is of course quite real-world; take away Stack Overflow, and the pace of global software development would plummet overnight.
Naturally, you can’t use chat apps or email or anything like that to get help, but you can certainly leverage the collective brain of the Server community. You should have the following websites ready:
- Tableau’s documentation
- Tableaulove.com -- while it lasts
- Paul Banoub’s blog
Don’t forget that you can search within a site using Google syntax such as site:vizninja.com OR site:tableaulove.com backgrounder. This will tell you everything Russell and Paul know about the backgrounder process -- and it’s a lot!
Tip #2: Think Real-World
I can’t be terribly specific here, but just bear in mind that this exam is aimed at testing your real-world Tableau knowledge. As the guide explains, this is in part a hands-on exam. You’ll be working with real servers (well, VMs) doing real things with Tableau Server. You should expect normal stuff to go wrong. If you don’t know what sort of normal things can go wrong, well, ask someone with more experience, and/or brush up on the troubleshooting guides for Tableau Server:
- https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/server/en-us/trouble_install_upgrade.htm
- https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/server/en-us/service_status_troubleshoot.htm
- https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/server/en-us/trouble.htm
- The whole Tableau KB for Server
Tip #3: Multi-task
Read the exam instructions thoroughly. I’m used to just plowing through exams in a linear fashion from first question to last, but that’s not the best way to approach this exam. Read all of the exam questions through before answered any of them. Some of the hands-on questions involve actions that take a while (I’m looking at you, tabadmin restart). You’ll save time if you perform some of these actions in parallel while working on other parts of the exam.
I could have probably shaved at least an hour off of the exam duration if I’d realized this sooner.
Tip #4: Leverage the Hints
If you’re nervous about this exam, remember: Tableau actually wants you to succeed. There are hints in the exam questions that help you figure out the solution or figure out what to google. There are hints in the Exam Guide that help you know what to prepare for. Without divulging specifics, I’ll just say: use these.
Tip #5: Know Your Stuff
Ok, this isn’t really a tip or trick. What I mean, though, is that you can’t expect to just wing this exam. If you don’t know at a granular and specific level what happens under the hood, step by step, when users perform actions like viewing dashboards, publishing datasources, signing in, etc., you’ll struggle to pass this exam. You should know all of the processes in Tableau Server by heart, including how they interact with each other.
To prepare for this exam, a colleague of mine and I took the list of topics at the end of the Exam Guide and pasted it into a spreadsheet. To save you the effort, here’s a link to a copy of that spreadsheet (I left my self-assessment in as an example):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1A4PBcEi1QzUM2oweGas4G8gmXyIit51Mwy-nSX7ADIU/edit?usp=sharing
And of course I made a very simple Tableau worksheet based on this to help me prioritize:
Before you mock how little effort I put into that worksheet, may I remind you that I wasn’t going for Certified Pro on Desktop...
Summary
- Read the exam guide.
- Have your favorite Tableau Server blogs on speed dial.
- Google things.
- Don’t be like a backgrounder; do more than one thing at a time.
- Read the questions thoroughly, all of them, before you begin.
- Know your stuff.
Do those things, and you’ll easily ace the Tableau Server Certified Professional exam.
Good luck!
