It has only (already?) been five weeks at the Data School. We have had three or so full days of Alteryx training, and occasional tasks with the software every other day. Despite how relatively little time we have spent on Alteryx so far, today I have passed my Alteryx Designer Core Exam! I would like to share my advice if you too only have a couple of days to prepare for it.

Getting to Know Alteryx

This stage should come before those couple of days dedicated to your exam preparation if you are completely new to the software. Before you can prepare for the exam, you should get yourself familiar with Alteryx in general - where all tools are, what the most basic ones do, where and how you build the workflow using tools, how you configure your tools and where can you see your results. Alteryx Challenges will help you to understand how to use the tools in practice better.

Exam Prep Guide

Once you know your way around in Alteryx, I highly recommend reading this official exam prep guide here. It gives you a very good idea of what you need to know for this specific exam, and what knowledge or skills you are lacking. The guide also describes the structure of the exam and gives some example questions which I found useful.

Exam-Specific Tools

My main preparation was to go over every single tool from the exam guide (24 in total). I did that in Alteryx using Open Example function for all tools. I carefully studied every example and made quite thorough notes in one Word document which I used whilst taking the exam.

Cheat by the Rules

The exam is open book, which means that you can use any help you wish - your personal notes, Alteryx Community help, or Alteryx itself. Make sure you have all the windows open ready to support you, including such specific ones as DateTime Functions and Alteryx File Types.

Relax!

I personally went to the exam with the thought that it was going to be a trial for myself simply to see what the exam is like, but not to pass it. It is easy not to stress about it as you can retake the exam every week for free. Perhaps the stress- and pressure-free environment helped me to pass the exam on the first attempt. So the final advise is to take it easy.

Best of luck!