Part of my goals while on bench was to prepare for and take the Alteryx Designer Advanced Certification exam. My intention was to take the exam this week - only to get an idea of what topics I needed to study up on, then take it “for real” next week. For that reason, I did not prepare any reference materials or text inputs to mess around with.

Surprisingly, I ended up passing high (93%) on my first go!

Similar to my previous blog post on taking the Core Exam, I’ll talk about how I went about taking this exam. I reviewed the Official Prep Guide so I had a general idea of the topics.

• Advanced Preparation  - I was most familiar with this topic; as my only warm-up on Monday, I completed several data preparation and parsing challenges (#22, #36, #59, #211)
• Advanced Join & Parse - RegEx is enjoyable for me (try out the RegEx crossword!), but I definitely need to review the Join Multiple tool and the number of outputs it produces.
• Spatial Analytics - these questions took the most time, in particular I need to review the Find Nearest, Spatial Info, and Spatial Process tools. Don’t forget about the Summarize tool either!
• Reporting - I needed to research these tools the most, as I had never used or seen them. What was handy was the Reporting Tool Overview page.
• Macros - Be sure to be familiar with the macro interface! This is a topic we cover in the DS training curriculum, but I would still want to become more proficient in macros and analytic apps. One question that was challenging for me was how to debug a macro in Alteryx … something I didn’t know was possible before the exam.
• Analytic Applications - I was unsure about the interface tools: which are used with other tools like the Select tool, for example.
• Data Investigation - The exam was my first exposure to these tools, thankfully the Alteryx documentation is sufficient for the exam questions. In particular I noticed more questions on the Field Summary Tool.

My suggestions:

• Complete the challenges suggested in the Advanced Certification Learning Path
  Macro Challenges - #95 and #110
  App Challenges - #115 and #175
  Parsing Challenges - #188 and #207
  Spatial Challenges - #84 and #204
  Reporting Challenges - #201 and #218
• Have some pre-built macros, apps, and workflows using spatial files beforehand
  Though this didn’t stop me from using tools to answer questions, I was never too sure as my tools didn’t have data connected to them. (See my last screenshot below)
• Read some other blogs by Data Schoolers - 1 by Frederik Egervari, 2 by Anna Prosvetova,
• Use two screens.
• You have 2 hours to answer 4 practical questions (10 points each) and 36 multiple choice/multiple select questions (1 point each). I finished in 1 hour 43 minutes. Both sections took me about the same amount of time to complete.
• The practical questions come at the beginning, and are worth over half the points, so I recommend taking care of them first.
  It took me 53 minutes to answer all 4 questions (around 10 minutes each, and a spatial practical question took the longest).

Here’s what the workflows of some practical questions looked like:

Here’s what it looks like when there are tools you’ve never seen before and you need to answer a question on them …

Now… time for me to catch up on those challenges above while I wait for my score report 😉