How “I” passed one of the HOTTEST IT Certification — Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer 2021…
By: Bitthal Khaitan
Tags: Certification, Big Data, Money, Technology, Cloud Computing

How “I” passed one of the HOTTEST IT Certification — Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer 2021 version?

Disclaimer: All views are my own & have nothing to do with my employer. Also, I have tried to keep this post per Google’s certification secrecy policies.

FIRST thigs first! GCP professional DE is the HOTTEST cloud certification of 2021. I am not saying this, the industry suggests so- See link:

https://venturebeat.com/2021/08/17/15-top-paying-it-certifications-for-2021/

2. Who am “I” ? Just another next door Data engineer with 10+ years of hands on Data Engg. experience in OLTP,OLAP, Bigdata & cloud. Been fortunate enough to work on some really large datasets. This is what helped ME most in cracking this GCP DE exam. I will explain in details how.

3. Certification preparation is like TRAINING a ML model :

If you do UNDERFITTING — You will FAIL both in exam & in real life.

If you do OVERFITTING — You will PASS the exam but FAIL in real life.

Choice is yours. If wish to succeed in both scenarios- practice & practice.

HINT: If you understand the keywords I mentioned above, you can answer some questions in the exam :)

4. Shortcuts can cut short your chances of passing! AVOID it. The exam is VERY scenario based so taking any short cuts, like asking questions from friends who have appeared won’t help much. They tweak the questions smartly for the very same scenario. So not sure how any PAID mock test can be helpful.

I myself wrote several pages of paper notes ( like we did in school ) to ensure I don’t forget some of the tricks & importsnt details.

5. Breadth & Depth of the GCP services — The exam covers almost all GCP DE related services like storage, ingestion, processing, consumption, governance etc. But one does not need to know all these services in depth. For some, if we just know WHEN to use & WHY , we are good. For some services we ALSO need to know HOW to use them EFFICIENTLY.

HINT: GCP is being marketed as an alternative to customers Data warehouse & Data lake on premise infra to Google’s infra. So MIGRATING data from on prem infra & its associated service offerings are key. Remember, COST is not always the choosing factor while selecting a cloud service, sometimes it is the “AVAILABILTY TO MARKET” / infra ramp up is a key differentiator.

6. Focus on YOUR strengths & work on weaknesses: Remember, the exam requires 70% to pass not 100%. So it is okay to not know everything. But before even preparing if you know your strengths & weakness it can help you.

In my case I have done only 1 real-life ML project & 0 stream processing ingestion project. So I knew these were my weak spots & I would score less here. This is exactly what happened in exam too. So I had prepared for the rest of the sections in depth. My past hands on experience made that easy for me and I was able to solve all scenario based questions.

7. LEARNING Resources I used: Different people learn new things differently. It seems my brain has been trained to learn from videos first & then text.

Google Cloud has some amazing short videos which I always watch & then follow up with Google sketches/blogs. Priyanka is an amazing teacher for sure.

For topics that requires deep understanding or have higher weightage in exam, I read Google clouds documentations multiple times. For example, Google BigQuery is a game changer for some DW,DL & ML use cases.

Not only I have a good understanding on how my organization is migrating to cloud but how other companies are doing too. A medium article by Walmart helped me understand the migration strategy they used, complete end to end landscape.

Last year some CVS employees had a 5 day GCP training. I was not invited to that training but I heard it was good. The trainer had shared some PDFs and hand written digital notes. I took access of those materials & it did help me plan when I started preparing for this. So if you are a CVS employee / contractor, contact me in company IM to get it.

8. How to get hands-on ? Hands on is a MUST. I did some of my practice in my day to day job. Also I used quicklabs. Qwicklabs has a 300$ FREE credit program which one SHOULD use. If you are smart, you will know how to get another 300$ credits :). GCP is fairly new as compared to some of its competitors, so getting internships and hands on is little challenging.

9. Exam time tip: You have 2 hours to complete the exam. HINTS to the answers are hidden in the question. Read the question very carefully. If required read it 2–3 times & it will confess the answer :).

Sample QUESTION format:

In 2020 USA presidential elections, a successful American businessman turned politician from the grand old party of the United states of America was defeated by a Democratic candidate. When this Democratic candidate was a Vice president in past, who was the POTUS?

Option 1 — Joe Biden

Option 2 — Kamala Harris

Option 3 — Donald Trump

Option 4 — Barack Obama

So if you don’t know what is POTUS — President of the US, you will be confused!

10. Lastly, THANK YOU for reading till the end! Believe in yourself & get GCP certified. If “I” can do it, YOU can do it BETTER than me. Good luck!