How to Prepare for Tableau Desktop 9 Qualified Associate Exam

Last week I passed the Tableau Desktop Qualified Exam, so I decided to give back to the Tableau community about my studying experience. I studied about 1-2 weeks for the exam, average about 2 hours per day, even though I had about 2 years user experience with Tableau. 

The purpose of the exam is to test how much a candidate is familiar with the software instead of how good a candidate's visualization skills are. A post named 'Rumor has it...' in the community discussed about the fact that some candidates with few years working experience in Tableau failed the exam. If you are wondering if you should invest time and money in the exam (as it's quite expensive), I recommend to read my other post Why Do You Want to Take the Tableau Certificate Exam. 

1. Determine Level of Skills

The 14 sample questions on the Tableau official preparation guide (Link) can be a place to measure a candidate’s Tableau skills. A candidate’s Tableau skills are: 

a. Advanced level 
if a candidate can answer all questions correctly within 30 minutes . 

b. Medium level 
if a candidate can answer all questions correctly within 1 hour.

c. Beginner level 
if a candidate answer fewer than 10 out of 14 questions correctly. 

Strategy for Beginner and Advanced Level
1) Beginner Level 
I strongly recommend to go over the Tableau On-Demand videos (Link) first and went through the sample workbooks embedded(see below) on Tableau Desktop before getting in depth into complex customized calculations. 

2) Advanced Level
I suggest to search the new features of Tableau Desktop 9 before taking the exam as Desktop 9 provides quite a lot of innovative new features that allow complex calculations. 

2. Make a Plan

After the skills level is determined, it helps a candidate to make a plan that improve knowledge of Tableau. I am going to use a candidate with medium level skills in Tableau as an example to make a study plan. The candidate with medium level skill in Tableau should be familiar with connecting the data, sorting the data, and creating simple calculation field. 

1)Top 15 Level of Details (Link)

I followed the steps written on the article to build the visualization. On the day before the exam, I built the visualization again without checking the methods written on it so I can make sure that I will be familiar to use level of details.

2) Sort the data within one  category: (Link)

3)  Filtering Top N and Top N : (Link)

4) How to use Set in Tableau: (Link)

5) How to create a Paretos Chart: (Link)

6) How to use Ad-hoc Analytics and save it: (Link)

7) How to use secondary calculation of ‘Edit table calculation'

8) Trouble shooting of mixing aggregation functions and non-aggregation together:(Link)

9) Automatic split and custom split: (Link)

10) Tableau On-Demand Training: (Link)

If you have more times to prepare for the exam, I strongly recommend the videos listed on the Tableau official page.

3. Exam Days

I strongly recommend people who use Mac version of Tableau to practice building dashboard on Windows as the virtual machine at the exam is Windows.

1) Expose to real environment of the exam

Watch this YouTube tutorial to see what a candidate expect to see during the exam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5V83ms7yr4

2) Get a mouse and a big monitor

a. Even the Internet I had for the exam is 64MB/s download and upload speed, the virtual machine is still very hanging.

b. I used my MacPro to finish the exam without a monitor, which reduced my speed in reading the questions and editing the calculation.

c. The multi touch gesture of MacPro is not available in the virtual machine.

d. Excel was not installed in the virtual machine so a candidate won’t be able to do the calculation outside of Tableau. 

e. Paper was not allowed to bring in the room.


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