How I prepared for the Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer Exam in 2022

And how I would approach it if I were to start over.

TLDR;

If I were to start over, I would probably spend 90+% of time on going through the sample questions on examtopics.com

Background:

I’m a software developer, who has had just over half a year exposure to building out a data pipeline with limited hands-on experience doing data engineering. I had no experience with GCP prior to starting my preparation.

In a nutshell, I fully share Daniel Bourke’s experience on the importance of mock exam questions. The number one predictor of my performance on the exam would be the amount of realistic sample questions I went through during preparation.

So, here come the resources I’ve used and what I thought of them:

Official coursera preparation track from Google

This very long official preparation track was certainly somewhat helpful, but taking into account the 40+ hours or so it took to complete, I wouldn’t say it wasn’t really worth it. Investing the same amount of time into practice questions and reading up on fundamentals of ML as well as the GCP documentation would have gotten me much further, I’m quite certain.

That being said, going through the qwiklabs did provide some valuable hands-on experience, even though most of it was copy-pasting commands and following instructions one to one.

Tip: completing the Engineer Data in Google Cloud Quest might provide the needed exposure to the most relevant services in just a few hours.

Also: I’ve heard good things about the Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer (LA), which should take only about half the time.

Cloud Guru Exam simulator:

The exam simulator at Cloud Guru provides a good set of questions that either actually came up in the exam or came very close to the format. It also had a somewhat realistic setup to train strategies of test taking.

I would agree to the recommendation of going into the exam only after consistently passing the simulation with 90%.

Examtopics.com

By the end of my preparation, the question deck on examtopics.com was almost the only resource I turned to. I’d say, about 80–90% of questions on my exam can be found in this deck, word-for-word.

The problem of examtopics, however, is that by far not all the provided “correct” answers are actually correct (some of them seem to have been selected randomly). The community’s solution can also be very much divided:

Here is how I approached each question:

I made sure I understood all of the terminologies and the pros and cons of the Google Cloud services mentioned. I then read through the comments of the community, until I could form my own opinion on the right answer.

Going through the whole deck of the question twice gave me enough confidence to book a time slot for the exam.

Other resources:

Google Data Engineering Cheatsheet by Maverick Lin : very helpful as a compact reference while going through the questions.

Official Sample questions from Google : have the same format as the actual exam. Go through them to gain confidence, that the other resources you use are appropriate.

Udemy practice questions (one and two) : These questions were also somewhat helpful to learn about the concepts of Data Engineering at GCP, but less helpful for the actual preparation.

Reviewnprep : Another set of mock exams. I haven’t actually gone through them but on first sight, the format does not exactly match the exam. The questions do seem useful for preparation in case you need to gain more confidence.

Conclusion

If you just want to pass the exam and you are short on time, focus early on the sample questions, especially those from examtopics.com. If you feel like you can learn just from reading the comments section there and diving into GCPs documentations, then this will be the most efficient way.

If, however, the concepts still feel too abstract, and you don’t want to spend time on the lengthy courses, maybe you could get away with just going through the Engineer Data in Google Cloud Quest.

That being said, if you also want to enrich your knowledge of data engineering and gain some practical experience with GCP, then going through the whole coursera track (or maybe just the one on Cloud Guru) will serve you well.

Good Luck!

Disclaimer: I don’t benefit from promoting examtopics.com in any way. Knowing about that resource earlier would have saved me tons of time during preparation and that’s what motivated me to post this article in the first place.