HOW TO: Pass the Alteryx Designer Core Certification Exam

Here are SIX actually practical tips that will help you pass the Alteryx Designer Core Certification Exam with time to spare!

 

 

1. Have ALTERYX and GOOGLE open

To be honest, you could easily ace this exam with JUST Alteryx and Google open. This test is partly a test of how knowledgeable about Alteryx you are, but actually more of a test on how well you know where to LOOK for answers.

If you know where to look, the Alteryx app is more than enough to pass this exam. The combination of building your own workflows, one tool examples, and being able to click on everything CAN provide you with all the information you need. HOWEVER, if you don’t know where to look, just Google it. Guaranteed, someone has already asked the question on the Alteryx Community forums. Or the search terms will magically link you to the actual Alteryx help site. Don’t waste your time looking for the right tab, just open a new one and start searching/building. Note: there will be a couple of questions on file/data types. Just Google, ‘Alteryx file types’…

2. Have a basic understanding of the FAVORITE tools

 

If I remember correctly (I took the exam a couple of hours ago), all the questions are limited to the use of these specific tools. I have expanded my Favorites to include all of them. But at the very least be familiar with how these tools work before you take the exam. You don’t even need to be well versed in them, a lot of the questions essentially walk you through the problem and you just have to recreate them.

3. Rebuild the questions using TEXT INPUTS

 

This tip alone will probably get you over the line. Text inputs are your best friend. Many of exam questions will consist of specific use cases of tools and/or what configurations of each tool will turn an INPUT to the provided OUTPUT. Example: What happens when you use this specific delimiter on this text?

   

Don’t waste your time thinking about a problem when you could just recreate it using text inputs.

4. Explore tool configuration settings using OPEN EXAMPLE

 

If you need to build a workflow even faster with an example dataset attached, click on the ‘Open Example’ section of the tool you need to explore. This will open up an example workflow with some of the common configurations/use cases of each tool. From here you can explore the configuration window of an already working tool. Don’t forget to Press RUN.

5. Be prepared to build some BASIC WORKFLOWS

 

Some of the questions require you to build a workflow to answer a specific question. These questions will provide you with a dataset (csv/xlsx) that requires some basic form of manipulation (e.g. transpose, summarize, filter formula, join, union, etc.).

In general, these questions require you to use two or more tools to solve a simple question. For example, a question could be similar to ‘What was the average [Total Sale] in the State with the most orders?’. So try to familiarize yourself with how combinations of tools can be used to achieve a goal.

6. Understand EXAM TECHNIQUE 

The exam consists of 80 questions, with the majority being 1 mark each. Some questions are 3 marks each. Since these questions are worth more, you can spend more time on them. However, this also means that you shouldn’t allocate 1.5 minutes (120 mins/80 questions) to each question.

Don’t waste your time searching for answers for low value questions, flag them (top right) and move on to the next one. If you have time at the end, click on see all questions (top left) and go through all your unanswered/flagged questions.

 

 

 

Remember, if you want to pass your Alteryx Designer Core Certification Exam…Type fast and Google faster. Good luck!