Get Tableau Certified

In addition to my Data Analyst badge, I just received an Early Bird badge for the Data Analyst:

But of course the question is always whether we really need badges.Tableau

If you pass the a Tableau certification, you get one of the Tableau Badges from Credly. A few days after being notified that I passed the exam. I received an email with my Data Analyst badge:

Credly has a bunch of options for sharing your Data Analyst badge.

Is there a benefit to sharing your badge? I guess that gets into the question of whether certifications make your more attractive in the job market. A few thoughts on this:

• If you google the question, you’ll see posts that simply assert, without evidence, that certifications are valuable. But where’s the data? What’s the evidence that certifications give an edge in the job market? How about a randomized control trial where we send resumes with and without certifications and see if it makes any difference in the response rate.
• We can get some sense of employer interest in Tableau Certifications by seeing how many listings there for “Tableau Certified” are on Indeed.com. It turns out that about 5% of the Tableau postings specifically mention “Tableau Certified.”

• Common sense suggests that certifications make more sense for someone early in their career or someone switching into data visualization. Experience and a track record of success will be more impressive than passing an exam.
• Some employers might actually have a negative association with certifications – they might see applicants showing a bunch of certifications as people who are good test takers, but not necessarily good employees.

Are you preparing for the data analyst? Check out these practice questions and this exam guide.

The most efficient way to study for a test is to take a practice test!

So we’ve released a free Certified Data Analyst test to help you prepare for the official Tableau Certified Data Analyst.

Question use the same formats as the official exam. There are 35 multiple choice, multiple selection, and active screen questions. Covering the same domains as on the official exam:

• Domain 1: Connect to and Transform Data
• Domain 2: Explore and Analyze Data
• Domain 3: Create Content
• Domain 4: Publish and Manage Content on Tableau Server and Tableau Online

Before you take a the practice test, I would recommend trying the two practice questions included in Tableau’s Certified Data Analyst exam guide: https://mkt.tableau.com/files/TableauCertifiedDataAnalyst_ExamGuide.pdf and going through this set of practice questions.

Nervous about the exam? I was nervous about answering questions in Domain 4 since I haven’t had much experience with Tableau Server and no experience with Tableau Online. And I’d never used Tableau Prep. But I found that reading the documentation and doing practice questions was enough for me to pass the Data Analyst exam.

Given that the Data Analyst exam uses “scaled scoring” rather than a simple percentage score to determine who passes, it’s currently tough for me to say how difficult the exam is or what percent of people pass the exam. But it seems like a good idea to do as many free questions as possible before taking the exam. Good luck!

I received the following email:

It took a while to figure out how navigate to see whether I passed. The link provided didn’t help, so I went here https://cp.certmetrics.com/tableau/en/home/dashboard. From there, navigate and click the “Go To Pearson” link where you can finally see your score:

Once on the Pearson site, you get the option to view Exam History or View Score Reports

Exam History just tells you when you took the exam and whether you passed.

You get a little more detail when you go to Score Reports… you can see your scaled score. 750 is passing and I did an 815. You can also download a PDF with your score. Love the photo.

Thinking about taking the exam? Check this free practice test.

I took the Tableau Data Analyst Certification on September 10th, 2021. Today I received the following email:

Hi there,

As the beta for this exam continues, we want to remind you that you should receive your exam by early January. We do not have an update on what your exam result is. But if you fail we will provide you a free retake of the live exam, once it launches. You will not see a record of your Tableau Data Analyst beta exam within your exam account until you receive a result, so don’t worry if you don’t see your exam listed there yet! We also want to thank you for being a beta believer and participating in this process, which is invaluable to the success of this exam!

Talk soon,

The Tableau Certification Team

What a delay! But Tableau did warn us… the Tableau certification fact explains that it will take up to 90 days after the “goal number” of exam administrations.

Tableau previously extended the Data Analyst beta period to the end of November. In today’s email they write, “As the beta for this exam continues…” and on the Data Analyst certification page they mention, “The beta for this exam has been extended through the end of the year. Take your exam now, and if you fail we’ll give you a free retake once the live exam launches.”

Tableau overestimated the rate of beta exam submissions. Will the offer of a free retake will make a difference?

Update 1/20/2022:

I got an email saying my results were available:

The results just say Pass – no details about how well I did on the different domains.

Took the beta version of the Tableau Data Analyst Certification today with PearsonVue. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s a link to the exam home page.

The only snag in the check-in process was that I received an error message when I was trying to start the exam, indicating I needed to shut down some background applications. I had no problem running the virtual machine – it was provisioned quickly with no help from the proctors.

It’s 70 questions, 13 of which are lab, so it takes a long time. I finished with just 30 minutes left.

All but one of the lab questions were very straightforward.

Tableau Server, Tableau Online, and Tableau Prep are mentioned in the curriculum, but in my opinion, it is not necessary to have access to these paid products to do well on the exam. This is a big deal because I worried that Tableau would be doing a SAS and telling those who want to learn the tool, “sorry, you can’t since you don’t have a license.” I think you can prepare very well for this exam using Tableau Public, though you should study a few Tableau Server/Tableau Online features (alerts, subscriptions, extract refreshes, publishing data sources).

The thing I hate about this exam format is that sometimes you feel you are being quizzed on GUI trivia. Part of the point of a GUI is that you don’t need to remember every detail! When you’re using Tableau, you work based on the context.

Make sure you know how to use the functions RANK, INDEX, FIRST, and LAST… I didn’t have much experience with any of those functions aside from RANK.

It’s annoying that you don’t find out whether you pass after you take the exam. Here’s what I see now on the Pearson site:

The delay is likely caused by the Lab is checked by a person rather than by an automated process… another reason to prefer the previous format.

I like the fact that they’re testing Tableau Server and Tableau Online. After all, in a corporate environment, you’ll often want to publish from Tableau Desktop to either Tableau Server or Tableau Online. But I wish they’d find a way to open up access to some sort of sandbox so that folks who don’t work for companies that use Tableau and don’t want to pony up for an $840 per year license had a way to experience the Tableau Server and Tableau Online features. Failing that, if only someone would record some great videos showing the features.

The Data Analyst exam is now out of beta, so if you take it now it’ll be shorter and you should get your results sooner.

Hope this review was helpful. If you’re preparing for the exam, be sure to do plenty of practice questions. I’ll post again when Pearson tells me whether I passed. I’m hustling to update my Udemy courses for the new Pearson Tableau certifications.

The Tableau Specialist exam has been revised – instead of 30 questions with a mix of hands-on and knowledge based questions, it’s now 40 questions with no hands-on questions. In the past the Specialist exam would be taken on a virtual machine, but with the new version you don’t need to actually use Tableau so there’s no

Here’s the Tableau page with the announcement of the move to Pearson: https://www.tableau.com/tableau-certification-faq and here’s Pearson’s Tableau certification page: https://home.pearsonvue.com/tableau.

As soon as I saw the change, I scheduled to take the Specialist exam with Pearson. Technical difficulties! Even after turning off various filtering software and disabling Windows Defender, I could not get the Video Streaming test to pass. I tried on three different computers: my work laptop, my personal laptop, and my wife’s laptop… same result all three times. I even tried connecting at my friend’s place, but I kept getting this:

When I did the system check I could not get by this message. Making matters worse, the chat help was not responsive and I spent more than 15 minutes on hold with Pearson before giving up. I sent an email to the support team.

Update: The support team responded two days later they followed up with this link https://home.pearsonvue.com/op/OnVUE-technical-requirements. I retried the system test without changing anything on my setup this time my system passed. I also heard from a student who finally got the system test to pass. I strongly suspect the problem was on Pearson’s end: