Huntsville

Certification comes in a lot of forms and titles. However, the usual intent of certification is fairly consistent whether you are taking medical board exams, trying to become a Certified Public Accountant or in this case, trying to pass Tableau Desktop 9 Qualified Associate. The intent is to determine if you have adequate training and skill in order for others to be able to rely on your work.

When you visit the Tableau website, one of the first places you want to start if you are interested in certification is the Learning page. What you will find there are free training videos, links for live online training, classroom training and for the product demos where you can see live, online walkthroughs. However, toward the bottom of the page is the link for Certification Program Details. This is where the rubber meets the road. Tableau certification comes in two different levels: Qualified Associate or Certified Professional. Since Tableau wants those who are certified to maintain a fresh perspective, these certifications are specified toward software release and product type versions (i.e., “Tableau Desktop 9 Qualified Associate” or “Tableau Server 8 Certified Professional”). Tableau offers refresher certification exams that bring one up from the previous version certification to the current version through what it calls the “Delta exam”. However, you cannot upgrade from a Qualified Associate to a Certified Professional through a Delta exam – it is only for version changes. According to the Delta FAQ, the only thing that the Delta exam tests are new features and changes between versions. Because this blog is primarily concerned with the Qualified Associate for Tableau Desktop 9, we will just suffice it to say that discussion pertaining to the Certified Professional or exams relating to the server edition will be matters for future blogs.

According to the Tableau certification page, the Qualified Associate has preparation that is suggested in three areas:

• Complete Fundamentals & Advanced courses
• 5+ months Desktop experience
• Review exam prep guide

The suggested courses are formal (either 2 days in-person or 5 days virtual) and Tableau provides full course descriptions both on the website as well as in PDF form for both of the courses:

• Fundamentals
• Advanced

As far as I could tell, there didn’t appear to be any significant differences between the course descriptions and what is shown in the exam prep guide so I chose to go the self-study route rather than do the expensive formal course. What I found when going through the exam prep guide was more or less the necessity to have a very broad knowledge base across the entire product. This means pretty much knowing everything from A to Z. That is the downside. The upside is that the depth of knowledge in all topic areas doesn’t have to go real deep for the Qualified Associate. What I did was to hit every one of the skills measured shown on the prep guide. Since each of them have links that take you to the online help, the faster route through all of this is just to go to the Tableau online help and read all of the topics.

After the detailed study of the online help, I went through the practice problems provided in the guide. One of my associates and I both came to the same conclusion on the first pass through the sample problems – we had enough knowledge to come up with the right answer but didn’t have enough knowledge to get to it in the fastest manner possible. In other words, for the Qualified Associate, the elegant solution isn’t necessary so get there whichever way you can. Another comment about the practice problems in the guide… there aren’t enough of them. Therefore, Google the internet and you’ll find a couple of sites that have a few other “sample” problems which really aren’t different problems. Instead they are the same problem restated with different variables so you at least get a few more chances to burn the pattern into your long-term memory. You will also run across a few YouTube videos that will help fill in some of the gaps by seeing Tableau in action from someone else’s viewpoint.

On the exam itself, there are both knowledge based questions where your answer (from multiple choice) is the only correct answer for a technical definition as well as problem questions where you will work with a live version of Tableau Desktop and have to come up with the correct answer to the question posed in the problem. The exam itself is run through a virtual machine so you don’t have to worry about having a copy of Tableau for the exam. Although my recollection isn’t perfect, it seemed that about 60% of the exam was knowledge and 40% problem. The minimum passing exam score is 75%. That means you can miss one out of four multiple choice knowledge questions and one out of four problem questions which had a higher point weight. Therefore, if you feel you are starting to bog down time-wise on the exam, make sure to hit the problems before filling in the holes on the knowledge based stuff.

There is probably a lot more to be said about my experience taking the Qualified Associate exam but rather than elaborating exhaustively here, my choice is to let the readers of this blog come up with their own questions or for that matter, their own experiences if they went through the certification process. That way this venue becomes more collaborative with more perspectives being shared.

Therefore, let the questions and comments pour forth……