Google Cloud offers a variety of professional certification programs to assess the expertise of professionals using different types of Google Cloud services in different domains. In the field of data science, it offers a very popular certification program named “Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer”. This certification, through an exam, checks the potentials of candidates working as or equivalent to data engineers and gives recognition to the candidates in the form of a certificate. Here, we will discuss this certification program in detail, where we will focus more on how to prepare to achieve this certification.
Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer certification
Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer is a suitable certification for those who are working in the field of data science and their roles are most likely to handle the data, process the data, do a lot of feature engineering on the data to make it ready for modelling purposes. The professionals whose day-to-day tasks include collecting the data, transforming the data and publishing the data for data-driven decision making should go ahead with this certification that will give them an opportunity to stand out from others.
However there are no strict criteria for this certification, but Google recommends having 3+ years of industry experience, out of which 1+ years should be related to designing and managing data related solutions with Google Cloud. The reason behind this recommended experience is that this certification assesses the candidate’s ability to design, build and operationalize the data processing systems and machine learning solutions with ensured quality. It also expects that a data engineer should be able to leverage, deploy, and continuously train pre-existing machine learning models.
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About the Exam
To achieve the Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer certification, the candidates need to pass an exam that is conducted by Google. This exam can be taken remotely with an online proctoring facility or it can be taken from the designated test centres across the world. To register for the exam, candidates need to pay a reservation fee of $200 USD. This exam is available only in English and Japanese.
The important details regarding the exam are given below:
- Duration: 2 Hours
- Number of questions: 50
- Format: Multiple choice questions
The questions in the exam belong to different topics including the following:
- Designing data processing systems
- Building and operationalizing data processing systems
- Operationalizing machine learning models
- Ensuring solution quality
The candidates appearing in this exam should align themselves with the aforementioned topics and ensure a strong understanding of these skills. However there is no information on the minimum passing score officially from Google, but as per the successful candidates, you must score at least 70% to pass the exam.
Steps to Prepare
As we have discussed above, there are different skills and knowledge expected from aspiring candidates. To meet these expectations and perform well in the exam, one needs to have excellent preparation. The following are the suggested steps a candidate should go through in order to achieve the goal:-
- Get the Required Information: First of all, you need to collect all the required information for this exam. You can find the highlights of this certification program on its official website. The second important detail that needs to be collected is the outline of contents to which the questions belong in this exam. You can find this outline using this link. Along with these, the sample questions for this exam are also provided by Google that can be found using this link. Using contents outline and sample questions, you can understand the breadth and depth of the exam.
- Prepare with Courses: Google Cloud offers a wide range of courses related to the skills needed for this certification. The list of these courses can be found using this link. Some of these courses are offered by Google Cloud itself, and some are offered by Coursera. These courses are arranged on a learning path that supports the candidates to prepare for this certification with the right content.
- Learn about Google Cloud Services: You can find here the details on a variety of Google Cloud services with their use cases and implementations. You should go through and learn about all the resources which are related to data engineering and data processing. Along with this, you can find here many documents and blogs related to Google Cloud services, including their application and use cases. All you need to do is to filter out the resources based on the exam contents outlined. These resources will help you in building a solid understanding of relevant Google Cloud services
- Take Mock Test: You can find many mocks exams on popular professional certifications offered by MachineHack, India’s leading hackathon and assessment platform. These mocks are provided for free, just to support the candidates. These are prepared based on the details as given by certifying organizations and feedback from the successful candidates. You can take the Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer Certification Mock test on MachineHack where you will experience taking this exam in real life. Here, you will see the same levels of questions belonging to all the required topics to be attempted within the stipulated time. After taking this mock exam, you will be able to assess your level of preparedness for the exam.
- Repeat the Steps: Repeat steps 2 to 4 until you get an excellent score in the mock.
Concluding Remarks
Nothing is difficult or impossible if it is adequately attempted with good preparation. Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer is a suitable certification for data engineering-related professionals as it gives them a chance to stand out from others. To achieve this credential, they need to crack an exam that requires good preparation. The candidates can prepare for this exam by going through a wide range of learning resources provided by Google Cloud and followed by a mock test that can be taken on the MachineHack platform.
Wishing all the best to the certification aspirants!
