I recently passed the Tableau Certified Consultant exam! This exam – Tableau’s newest top-level certification – is definitely challenging, and preparing for it can be difficult. In today’s post, I’ll share some of my thoughts, tips, and opinions on the exam structure and the certification itself.

What’s the exam about?

Let’s start at the beginning: What does the Tableau Certified Consultant exam actually certify? Here’s the quick overview:

• The certification demonstrates the skills needed to lead a full-scale Tableau implementation: That’s everything from server structure to data structures, data governance to advanced chart types, performance improvement to licensing – basically, the whole lifecycle of an organization-wide Tableau deployment.
• It also certifies all of the skills covered in the Tableau Desktop Specialist and Tableau Certified Analyst certs – it doesn’t explicitly test on those skills but tests higher-level skills instead. (If you’re curious about the Tableau Certified Analyst test, check out my older post here – some details are out of date, but the general content is still relevant).

The test is split into four domains (although they’re not equally weighted).

1. Evaluate Current State. These questions are about setup – what data exists? How can you track that data? Should a client use Tableau Server or Cloud? What products/solutions would meet the client’s needs?
2. Plan and Prepare Data Connections. Where is the data coming from, and how do we connect to it? How should security be handled? How should the data be structured and pre-processed?
3. Design and Troubleshoot Calculations and Workbooks. What advanced chart types or features (DZV, etc) should be used? How would you implement LOD or table calcs? What might be causing bugs or performance issues, and how could you fix them?
4. Establish Governance and Support Published Content. How should permissions and data governance be handled? How do you monitor performance? What problems might occur?

Domain 3, which is weighted heaviest at 39%, is the most similar to the Desktop Specialist and Analyst exams because it covers actually building dashboards in Tableau. However, you won’t find any questions about how to create a line graph or add a total – this exam focuses only on advanced skills, like LODs, table functions, and chart types beyond the show-me panel. Performance issues are also a big focus!

How do you prepare? (And should you take this test?)

I’m grouping the questions of preparation and who should take this test together, because they kind of answer each other. This test is difficult to prepare for because it assesses a huge range of skills, and those skills often aren’t cleanly documented. (Or at least not cleanly documented in one place).

Bluntly, the best way to prepare for this certification is to work at a job where you do the stuff the test covers. You don’t have to hit every point – and unless you have many years of diverse consulting experience, you probably won’t have seen every possible combination – but a lot of the test content is difficult to practice outside of a professional context.

Domain 3, the actual Tableau building domain, is the easiest to do outside of work experience. You can practice advanced chart types, LODs, table calcs, etc, in Tableau Public. Workout Wednesday challenges are a great resource for practicing this. You can also learn a lot about performance assessment and improvement by reading – I found this whitepaper to be very helpful (although it is a few years out of date, the deep dive into performance was very cool to explore).

The other categories, which focus on an organization-level implementation, are harder to practice if you don’t actually work with Tableau at an organization. You may be able to put the pieces together on your own – the exam guide for this test has a great list of resources, which is where I recommend starting – but there’s no one “here’s everything you need to know” document where you can just learn everything, so it will require you to be resourceful. By far, the easiest way to prepare for this test is by working professionally with Tableau for several years.

With that in mind, who should take this test? It’s definitely best suited for folks who have been doing Tableau consulting, ideally for a while, and ideally with several companies. The official guide says that the candidate should have at least one year of experience with Tableau products, but this feels low to me. If your experience with Tableau is mostly working on Tableau Public, this probably isn’t the test for you.

Tips and Tricks for the test itself

2/3 sections on this test are multiple choice (some single select, and some multi-select). The middle third is lab-style, where you open a virtual machine in the test itself and do several tasks in a workbook. After each section, you save your work and cannot go back.

I don’t have a ton of tricks for this test. There’s a lot of “you either know it or you don’t” questions, so studying (and carefully reviewing the topics and links in the exam guide) is the best place to start. With that in mind, here are a few things I noticed that might help you too:

• If at all possible, take this test on a desktop. The virtual machine for the lab section is so squished by the test-taking window that you’ll only have about half your screen to work on (you may or may not be able to expand it a little, but there still won’t be much). On a laptop, this is tiny.
• If you get soft-locked by screen size, change the aspect ratio. On one question on my test, the pop-up window I needed was too big for the screen. You can’t scroll or change the size of the pop-up (as with most pop-up dialogs in Tableau – please, Tableau, change this!), so it just goes off the bottom of the screen and is inaccessible. I worked around this by opening the virtual machine’s settings and changing the aspect ratio, which added a scroll bar on the side of the screen. Note: In my opinion, this is a significant problem that shouldn’t require this kind of work-around, and should be fixed in the test itself – but until that happens, here you go.
• During the lab section, you will have the full “Tableau Desktop and Web Authoring” PDF available. I strongly recommend getting familiar with what’s in here and the structure beforehand! The PDF is over 3000 pages long, and the virtual machine runs too slowly for ctrl+f to be super useful. (It works, but it’s slow). If you know what you’re looking for, it can be very helpful; however, navigating it on the virtual machine is frustrating.
• Read the questions (especially the lab questions) extremely carefully. The test documentation suggests that the questions are all-or-nothing, including the lab questions. That means that missing even one minor step will get you 0 points for the whole question. Read, re-read, and re-read again.
• Accept ambiguity. I found many questions on the test to be somewhat ambiguous, or missing necessary context. (More on this in the next section). All you can do here is give the best answer with the information you have. Don’t waste all of your time running in circles.

what I disliked about the test

I’m going to be completely honest here – I’m not sure I can whole-heartedly recommend this test to others. It’s a difficult test to begin with, and there are some issues that I think make it harder.

I found quite a few questions on the test that were frustratingly ambiguous. In the Tableau world, especially at this kind of level, the answer to questions is so often “it depends”. On a lot of questions, I felt like there just wasn’t enough context to actually make the right decision – it seemed like I was having to guess at what the writers were intending.

I also didn’t feel confident that the questions were all correct – a couple had internal continuity answers, seemed to have no correct answer, or had multiple answer options that would work. Some questions are included in the exam for testing purposes (trying out new questions) and aren’t scored, so maybe those are the questions I encountered. (Or maybe I just missed something!) But it didn’t give me a great deal of confidence in the test itself.

Ultimately, a test like this can only really say so much about your abilities. The exam was difficult enough that the certification definitely isn’t meaningless – if you can pass it, you probably know your stuff! – but it’s not the only way (or the most important way) to define your ability to do this work.

In Conclusion

Ultimately, I don’t regret my decision to take this test, and I’m glad I have the certification. If you think you’re ready, I encourage you to give it a shot! However, go into it with eyes wide open. It covers a huge range of topics, and the ambiguity of some questions can be frustrating. I think this certification might not quite be fully baked yet – maybe the next iteration will feel smoother.

In the mean time, good luck to any future test takers! If you have any more questions, please ask in the comments, and I’ll answer anything I can.