Tableau 10 Desktop Certification Tips!

I recently went through the Tableau 10 Desktop Certification process (Qualified Associate and Certified Professional exams) and wanted to share some preparation tips that can help you display your best work on both tests!

THE BASICS

• Qualified Associate Exam: 2 hours, 36 questions (all multiple choice) spanning Data Connections, Organizing and Simplifying Data, Field and Chart Types, Calculations, Mapping, Analytics, and Dashboards.

• Certified Professional Exam: 3 hours, all hands-on development (no multiple choice) spanning building with Visual Best Practices, Advanced Calculations, and Storytelling.

THE GAMEPLAN

Especially when it comes to the Certified Professional Exam, I would urge you to think about the following: 

"What can I do to maximize the time spent showcasing my visual analytics expertise during this exam?"

As mentioned, the test is 3 hours long and all viz / dashboard / storyboard development. It is challenging, even for a full-time, daily Tableau developer, because you need to pace yourself. Normally, you don't have unrealistically short, multi-hour deadlines to build something (hopefully). Normally, you have time to think about your data, colors, layout, formatting. Normally, you can iterate and refine multiple times before you finalize a single product (viz, dashboard, or story).

During the 3 hour exam, you'll build nearly a dozen worksheets or more, a dashboard, and a storyboard, all of which span numerous datasets and separate questions / prompts. For the most part, it's a race against the clock. You want to limit time wasted to low-value-add tasks or large formatting decisions that you could have planned out earlier. Ideally, you want to spend as much time as possible thinking about and implementing visual best practices (and having fun!) in Tableau.

THE TIPS

These tips are largely geared towards preparing for the Certified Professional exam, but some can be helpful for the Qualified Associate exam as well. This list assumes you've already read through the official exam prep guides (links above) and associated material.

1. Eva Feng's (ie, Viz Panda's) blog post is a solid place to start (it is geared towards the Qualified Associate exam), and has some great resources and tips.
2. Tableau's (Beth Lyons') blog post on LOD Expressions. This is recommended by Eva, but it is worth repeating here as well. Most obviously, it covers a broad range of LOD calcs (easy to hard, single to nested, fixed to include to exclude). Less obviously, it contains business vocabulary, metrics, and datasets that Tableau likes to reference. The more familiar you are with them, the less time you'll spend scratching your head during the exam(s).
3. Review Tableau's most prominent sample datasets (ie, Superstore, Coffee Chain, World Indicators). Be somewhat familiar with how the data is structured (dimensions, measures, granularity). Again, the more familiar you are with them, the less time you'll spend reviewing if you encounter them on the exam.
4. Pre-plan basic design or formatting decisions. What font do you plan to use? What about size? What about your titles / sub-titles / story points? Do you want to use shadings? Tooltips? Colors? Naming conventions? No, you obviously can't pre-plan the entire dashboard and layout. Yes, you could use out-of-the-box settings during the test. Yes, you could decide these things quickly on-the-spot. But, if you have a basic idea of how you want to build, present, and polish your analysis, it can be a real time-saver, and bail you out if you need more precious minutes to further understand, debug, or analyze a specific piece of the test.
5. Pay attention to section weighting. Not all sections of the test are weighted equally. Plan accordingly. 'Nuff said.
6. Don't get hung up extensively on a single prompt. The wording may be confusing. You might get an answer that is clearly wrong. You might get writer's / vizzer's block. You might not know how to do something. Just move along and keep the larger exam in mind.