Thinking about taking the Tableau Desktop 10 Qualified Associate Exam? Then hopefully this blog post will provide you with some useful information!
How Best to Prepare
First, start with the Exam Preparation Guide and navigate through the requirements to identify where your skills are. Make sure to measure your time when solving sample questions, this will give you a better estimation of your level. If you are an experienced Tableau user you should be able to answer everything correctly within 30-40 minutes. Don’t be fooled though, you might still want to take a full-length preparation exam, which we will mention later in this post.
If you were able to answer everything correctly, but it took longer than you prepared yourself for, I would recommend you take a look at this courseon Udemy which has been designed specifically for the QA exam. There are 63 lectures which include an introduction to the topic, multiple choice quiz questions and video solutions. You can find interesting tips and tricks that can be useful not only in the exam, but for general Tableau knowledge. At the end of the course, there is a full-length preparation exam which can give you a taste of what the real exam will look like.
If you really want to boost your Tableau skills and bring them to the next level, InterWorks and Tableau provide onsite and online courses that cater for different levels and can bring your skills from zero to ace! Of course, keep in mind that Tableau or InterWorks won’t do the hard work for you and you still need to practice yourself. I have attended Desktop I and Desktop II courses before taking the exam and it helped me a lot.
Exam Time!
Now, a few things about the exam environment. The first 15 minutes before the exam start, are used for technical setup. Don’t forget to check your system upfront to avoid additional stress. The exam itself takes two hours and it runs on a virtual machine. This means that keyboard shortcuts and other time saving tricks probably won’t work. It might be useful to place a browser screen and Tableau window side by side for easier navigation since the standard alt + tab does not work.
Note that during the exam you can be interrupted by the proctor when the video needs to be restarted or there are other similar technical issues, which is super annoying. Most of the questions are multiple choice and around 5-10 are True/False questions and you can access the Internet to answer the questions. Each exam attempt must be paid for and there is a fixed four months period between second and third attempts.
Top Tips to Help You Through
- Take time to prowl the Tableau Community and watch the online videos, if you haven’t done so already. Make sure you really understand what’s happening and you are able to reproduce the steps.
- Don’t panic if you get stuck with the question. Mark it with a flag and come back to it later.
There are several blog posts for additional help and discussion forums, but the key to success is practice. In total, I spent 2 weeks preparing for the QA Exam with 2.5 months of Tableau experience. The more experience and knowledge you have, the better your chances are. Good luck!