Tableau Certification

This week I got my Tableau 10 Qualified Associate Certification. This post is to share about this certification and give some tips.

About the Tableau Certification

There are two levels of certification:

The Qualified Associate.
The Certified Professional.

This post is about the Qualified Associate exam using Tableau Desktop 10 version.

Booking and Set up

You do everything online. From booking to the exam itself. Booking was easy with a lot of availability. Before the exam, you have some technical set up to do in order to be able to connect to the exam center. To do the exam, you have to connect via remote connection. You need a webcam and mic and your whole session is recorded.

The Exam

The exam duration is two hours. It has 36 questions, some are theoretical and some practical hands-on. To the practical questions, there are several data sets that you'll have to use. To pass it, you need a score of 75%. The cost of the exam is $250 USD and the results come right after you submit your answers. You also receive a report by email.

My experience

I finished in about one hour and a half and spend the rest of it reviewing my answers. I've got 100% correct. In my opinion, questions were straight forward and the exam was fair. It tests if you know how to use Tableau and how to answer some questions from the data. This exam does not test one's ability to tell a story from a data set. This would be the next level certification.

My preparation

I took one course at BCIT with Donnabel Santos, which I really recommend if you are in Vancouver. My practical experience is basically from that course and from some personal projects. Before the exam, I reviewed most of the Tableau training videos, which was important.

Some tips

There are free videos from Tableau training site which are really helpful. I recommend watching them. Even the basics videos can give you some tips. Tableau also offers two preparation courses but each costs $ 1,400 USD.

The Tableau preparation guide list all the functionality you should be prepared, which is almost everything. It also has sample questions that help to prepare.

Some things I had to do and I recommend you should know:

How to use the data interpreter.
How to make joins and the difference between outer and inner joins.
How to change a join connection manually.
How to create and use a set.
How to create a map.
How to measure distances on a map.
How to create calculated fields.
How to use table calculations.
How to calculate profit margins.
How to create dashboards actions.
How to use the Analytics functions.
I didn't have to use level of details calculation but it might be needed.
Read questions carefully and at least twice. Watch out for what the question asks for (for example, rank based on the sum or average).
Concepts about data connection and data extracting.
You can use the Internet to look out for answers. I only used the Tableau online documentation. It helps if you a familiar with the documentation beforehand. Know how to search for keywords. Some answers are straight forward to find in the documentation. Others aren't, so you have to figure it out.
You should be familiar with the sample superstore data set. Practice with it. Create calculated fields, sets, and explore the dimensions (category, segments, customers, etc).

Good luck!