I recently passed Tableau’s Data Analyst exam, and became a Tableau Certified Data Analyst! In today’s post, I’ll share my experience with the exam, what to prepare for (+how to prepare), and whether the certification is worth it.

What’s Taking the Test Like?

Here are the basics: The exam is 2 hours long, proctored, and has 50-60 questions. It’s split into three sections, two of which are theoretical (you answer questions about how or why to do something, but don’t actually do it), and one of which is practical (you do actual work in Tableau in a virtual environment). You can take the test at home with online proctoring, or in a test center.

I chose to take my test at home, virtually proctored. I didn’t have to travel, and I was able to schedule my test very quickly. The experience was similar to other virtually proctored tests I’d taken in the past – I uploaded a photo of my ID, connected with a proctor and used my webcam to show my testing environment, and then took the exam.

The biggest downside of doing the virtual proctoring was screen size. My home computer is a laptop, and since you’re not allowed to use secondary monitors for the test, I was working with a limited ratio. This made some of the questions in the virtual Tableau environment tricky, because I couldn’t see the full screen – however, it didn’t prevent me from answering any questions.

What’s On the Test?

Tableau covers the specifics of the exam in their official guide. In general, the test contains a lot of questions about Tableau Desktop (or public, or web edit), a few questions about Tableau Server/Cloud, and a few questions about Tableau Prep.

The questions were all about fundamental Tableau skills using built-in functionality, but they definitely went deep. You won’t see any questions about chord charts or network diagrams, for example, but pretty much anything that has a button or menu item is fair game. I was asked about everything from show/hide buttons to container spacing, plus questions about calculated fields and data preparation/joins.

Are You Ready?

Are you ready to take the Tableau Certified Data Analyst test? Because the exam dives deeply into the details of Tableau, it’s definitely not suitable for beginners. If you’re still at the learning stage where you do a lot of googling and trial-and-error to make things work in your dashboards, it’s probably not the right time to take the test.

One of the biggest factors in that is that most of the test isn’t in a Tableau environment. It’s purely theoretical – for example, you might be shown a chart of sales and asked what the steps are to create a second column that shows the total by region. (Theoretical example, not an actual question!) The tricky part is that you don’t get to try it. You can’t test out ideas and see if they work.

That means that you have to be familiar enough with the process that you can explain it from memory, without having Tableau in front of you. That’s a stage that takes a while to get to, because it requires a level of comfort with Tableau’s core functionality that only comes from practice, repetition, and experience.

How Should You Prepare?

For my test, I didn’t do any special preparation beyond reading over the topic list and making sure I was familiar with everything on it. I’ve been using Tableau for several years, and I’m pretty confident in my core knowledge. Even so, there were a few questions I just didn’t know – they weren’t about functionality that I use in my field, and so I had to take my best guess.

If you’re newer to Tableau, the best way to prepare is practice. The more you work with Tableau, the readier you’ll be for the test. Workout Wednesday is a great community project for this, because it’ll widen your range and expose you to functions you haven’t used before.

Overall, I felt that the exam was really well aligned to actual Tableau skills, and was a fair assessment. Because of that, the best way to get ready for the test is just to work in Tableau. Create vizzes, look at how others make their vizzes, read blog posts, try community challenges. When you’re a confident Tableau user, check out the list of covered topics and make sure you don’t have any gaps.

Tableau does offer preparation courses for the test – I didn’t do one, so I can’t speak to their effectiveness. My guess is that if you’re newer to Tableau or don’t yet work in a job where you use Tableau frequently, a course could be a good way to direct your learning. From my experience, the course definitely isn’t necessary to pass the test.

Is It Worth It?

Real talk: This test is expensive. At $250, it’s in line with a lot of other certifications, but that’s not pocket change. The certification lasts for 2 years, and after that you have to take the test again.

Because of that, it’s probably not worth doing the exam if you don’t have a specific reason for doing it. If you’re not job hunting, looking for a promotion, trying to find freelance work, or some other specific goal, you probably won’t get much out of having the certification. For me, I decided to become certified to help me find freelance work; for a lot of clients, the certification is an important mark of credibility.

Was it worth it? Right now, it’s too early to tell! I’ll let you know. All I can say for the moment is that I do feel that getting certified helped make my qualifications more solid, and I’m glad I decided to take the exam.