How to pass the Cloud Architect and Data Engineer GCP certifications

I have recently taken both the Professional Data Engineer and Professional Cloud Architect GCP exams to renew my certifications. This is how I managed to pass both exams. As a bonus, I share here the study guides I created for both exams.

Cloud Architect and Data Engineer certification logos.

General information about the exams

• Length: 2 hours
• Registration fee: U$200 (plus tax where applicable)
• Languages: English, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese.
• Exam format: Multiple choice and multiple select, taken in person at a test center.
• Prerequisites: None
• Recommended experience: 3+ years of industry experience including 1+ years designing and managing solutions using GCP.

Reference: Professional Cloud Architect and Professional Data Engineer pages

Usually, these are the steps I follow when I decide to take a certification:

1. Read the exam overview: Professional Cloud Architect and Professional Data Engineer;
2. Read the exam guide: Professional Cloud Architect and Professional Data Engineer;
3. Next, I visit the products page of the platform and identify each product that may be related to the topics listed on the exam guide. For GCP, you can find this list here.
4. For each of the products identified in the prior step, I visit its Documentation / Concepts page and start reading about each of the concepts that I consider relevant for the given product. Check the GCE concepts page, for example.
5. You’ll probably notice some products seem to overlap with each other and find it difficult to known when to use one or the other. Google Search is your best friend here :)
6. After I go through each product and its concepts, I read the sample study cases provided by Google and try to design potential solutions that could address the requirements described on them. For the Professional Data Engineer exam, the sample study cases have been recently removed. For the Professional Cloud Architect exam, you can find the sample study cases at the end of the exam guide.
7. Finally, I take the practice exam (Professional Cloud Architect and Professional Data Engineer). The practice exam provides an explanation for each of the questions after you finish and is very good to have an idea of the format of the questions you’ll face and how prepared you are.
8. After I finish the practice exam, I take notes of the topics I didn’t go well and re-read the relevant documentation I collected on step 4 above.
9. I will then take the practice exam again (you can take it as many times as you want) and keep repeating steps from 6 to 8 until I feel confident to take the exam.

Study guides

If you think it’s a lot of work, you are right. It certainly is! But fear not, I have good news for you: I created and shared spreadsheets containing all the material I used to pass both exams.

You can freely copy, change and distribute this material. The only thing I would kindly ask you is to keep a reference to original material and give me proper credits.

GCP Professional Certifications - Study Guide 2019

To use it, create your own copy. Once you do it, the spreadsheet will be made writable to you and you’ll be able to update the Status column, which you’ll help you to track your progress along the material:

A screenshot of my spreadsheet with reference material for both the Cloud Architect and the Data Engineer exams.

Disclaimer

This guide is shared with the only intent of helping people aiming to take the Professional Data Engineer and Professional Cloud Architect certification exams. Be advised there is no guarantee that following the guide will make you pass the exams. Use it at your own discretion.

Tips for taking your exam

1. Know what each product does, what it’s good for and what it’s not good for, as well as its billing characteristics;
2. As described before, you have 2 hours to finish the exam. Keep in mind that good time management is crucial for your success;
3. Don’t spend too much time on questions you don’t know. If you aren’t sure about an answer, mark the question to be reviewed later and move on to the next questions.
4. Practice as much as possible using the practice exams.

Conclusion

In my opinion, the best value of a certification is to act as a guide you can follow to know which subjects are important to learn as a professional if you are willing to work with a specific technology. Also, it helps me to stay focused in my studies, since I don’t want to throw the money I invested in the waste :).

Besides that, certifications are still highly valued by the market and may help you to stand out from the crowd.

I hope this article and the referenced study guides help you in your journey to become a Google Cloud certified professional and wish you all the success.

Photo by Nghia Le on Unsplash

Stay tuned! I hope to share similar study guides for both the Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer and Professional Cloud Network Engineer certifications soon.

If you think this is helpful, please leave your 👏 and feedback below.

Thanks for reading and good luck!

Special thanks to Marcos Vallim, Rafael Nogueira and Andre Idalgo Rodrigues for reviewing the article.

Extra Notes

• The Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification study guide can be found here.