How to Pass the Alteryx Certification | Alteryx Expert Shares Top Tips

Hi there. Welcome to the webinar. This is Richie. So Alteryx is one of the cooler platforms for enterprise data analytics. And if you want to get a job at a place where Alteryx is used, or maybe you already work at such a place and want a promotion, then you're going to need to be able to demonstrate your skills. And as luck would have it, Alteryx, the company provides a comprehensive set of certifications on Alteryx the product. And that means that if you want to work with Alteryx or you already work with Alteryx, then it's really a no brainer to take this certification. So today you're going to learn what skills you need in order to pass the certification, what you need to study in order to get ready, and how you can make use of the certification to help your career. Our guest is Joshua Burkow. He's the chief evangelist at Alteryx and fast becoming a data camp webinar regular. So teaching people how and why to use Alteryx is his day job and since he actually works at the company, I'm hoping he can give us some inside tips on how to pass the certification. And so before Alteryx, Joshua has also worked at PwC and Nike in the data areas there. And he's also a sergeant in the US Marines. And on top of this, he's the author of Alteryx Design at the Definitive Guide. So a very comprehensive set of credentials there for teaching us about the certification. Please do take it away, Joshua.

Thank you as always, Richie. I'll be sending you a shirt just to commemorate this continued approach of Data Data Camp. So thank you so much. Grateful to be with you all. We're going to cover a topic I'm pretty passionate about. I still get excited about all the people that are learning and utilizing Alteryx. So grateful that you're all here. I am not going to make this a marketing level speech. I'm going to make this very practical. So we're going to get into the weeds a little bit. I would ask that if you're truly invested in getting a certification, be ready. We've got some links that are going to be thrown at you so you can either follow along or you can follow up afterwards. I'm going to go through a lot of resources, materials for you and give you everything that you need to get after your first course certification. And this course certification is one of many that we'll talk about, but it is the one that I think gets most people on board and productive with Alteryx. It is a highly, highly valuable certification that allows you to really step up into Alteryx, know that you know Alteryx and validate it. I think it also gets you excited because our certifications are notoriously known for not being easy and they're not impossible, but they're a good challenge. They're the right level of challenge for you to know and validate, to certify that you know your Alteryx. And that's what we want. We don't want some. A piece of paper, just for a piece of paper. I know sometimes it feels like that, but I would ask that you really lean in and work hard on it. I'll cover. I'm going to cover a bunch of different areas, but it's all in the intent that you have all the resources you need to take the exam. I'm going to talk first about what's available. We'll walk through what certifications are available in general so you understand where the course certification sits in the. In the grander scheme of all those. I'm also going to give you a few reasons why, just so you remember those as you're going through these certifications. If you're new to the tech world or you're new to Alteryx or just certifications in general, sometimes you might not know why are certifications even useful nowadays? And I would argue they still are. They still are a very, very valuable resource that, you know, hiring managers, HR companies really validate, especially with software like Alteryx, because it's a pretty specific skill set and it's pretty powerful skill set. And so there's a real huge need for Alteryx developers today. And so anyone who is able to show a certification on their LinkedIn profile or resume or anything like that is immediately shines above and steps above other potential candidates. So super valuable there. All right, let's get into it. I'm gonna. Perfect, thank you. I'm going to share the screen here and we're going to start with the community and I'm going to get into certification. But I want to be very clear about how I'm getting there so that you all can. When you're working through this yourself, you kind of know the flow of how I got there and what I did. So first thing to know is the community at Alteryx is second to none. The Mavericks community. There is no other place like it. We've won awards for this community. So the community is one conglomeration of all of the users and both internally and externally around the world that come together to share the love of Alteryx. There's a lot of Learning a lot of content out there, so it can be a bit overwhelming. It's why I start here so I can show you how to get to the certification landscape within it. So the biggest piece, when you come into community, just so you know, it's community.alteryx.com Again, we'll have the, the, we have the link to the resources in there. But when you come to the community, the place that we're going to be in is in the learning section of, of the Academy. Right. So if we click on Academy, so we're just going one level into the Mavericks community is the Academy. Within the Academy, you have a whole bunch of other resources as well. The one that we're going to focus on is certification for today. Maybe later on we talk about other, other resources available to you, but today we're going to focus on this. So now you know how I'm getting there. You can also just go to Academy and then go down to certificate, certification exams or certification resources if you, if you need to. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about this at a high level and then we'll start to get into the user guide or the, sorry, the prep guide and specific resources that you need to be fully prepared for the exam. But I really want you to understand at a high level first is what certifications are, are available in the first place. And so we, we have a, we have a couple groups of certifications that I'll cover. The, the first one is micro credentials. Now, micro credentials are, think of them as the precursor to the core certification. Now there are some folks that are great at taking tests, they're great at certifications, they're great at kind of pushing them through the process of studying and preparing. And they're good at starting at just the core prep. And the core prep is really about having a basic fundamental understanding of Alteryx. You know how to get in there, you know how to create a workflow, you know what is a workflow. These are all things I'll cover a little bit more in a second. But it's the foundation of it. But what they've done and the amazing team that we have at Alteryx, the certification team, they made it kind of stepping stones up to the certifications. So. And these are all called micro credentials. These micro credentials are sort of an easier way to get started that can build up to a core exam. Okay. So you can go through these at any given time. They're usually a shorter amount of time, so an hour still have roughly 40 questions. And they provide a lot of the same information that you would have on the core exam. So we can, we can talk about this as one way to get to the core. And this micro credential, for example, is the general knowledge. This is the data prep section, data manipulation, data transformation, which I will show you when we break down and we get into the prep guide. These are really the four main areas of the course certification. So again, if you feel that you need a little warm up, meaning you want to start slowly and build up, great. But maybe if you've been using Alteryx for a year, you can jump right into core and not do the micro credentials. But both are available to you and both are valuable in their way. Let's talk about this topic right here around why getting certified? And I want to make sure that you're settled on this so that we, when you come to certification, it's, you have this front of mind because the course certification is easier. I never want to say it's easy. You know, for some people it's super easy. For some it's, you know, it takes a couple of times to get through it. But it is an important stepping stone to ones that like advanced certification, which I would label as sufficiently difficult, hard and expert, which is excruciatingly difficult. And expert being the certification that will define your, your ability to, to call yourself an Alteryx expert. That's incredibly difficult. And, and it's a really, really noble challenge to go after. So why do you get certified Professional credibility? I have always, since I got started with Alteryx, have been able to lean on the Alteryx certifications as a cornerstone for me to make a decision whether I trust that someone is as good as they say they are in Alteryx. Sometimes you see the work they do and you can understand that they have a level of competency within the Alteryx platform. That's great. But when you're a hiring manager or you have to bring on many different Alteryx developers quite frequently, you know, a lot of the big four, for example, they don't have the ability to look through all the different details of your Alteryx experience. So they're going to look at the easy things, which is, hey, are they certified and to what level they're certified. I will give you my own 2 cents in this in how I kind of evaluate the value of the certifications. If I see two people side by side and one person is core certified and the other is not, I obviously going to have a higher level of confidence that they know what they say they know, but when it gets into the advanced and expert certifications that maybe we talked about it at a future webinar is an advanced cert is roughly three to five times more powerful to me as a course certification, meaning I know that if I am able to get this advanced certified person or an expert certification, they're going to be a multiple more reliable and more powerful in being able to showcase and use and be valuable with their altered skills. So when we talk about this sort of professional credibility, this is where it kind of shines through. And when it does shine through, it increases your earning potential. It gives you a leg up to where you are more valuable because you have those skills and they are verified. And this sort of goes across the board with all certifications, but. Certified.

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You just want to rewind like hopefully everybody. So then the last one is career advancement. So this is one where you start to be able to move farther and faster in your career because you're, you're able to shine with your Alteryx experience. I would also say the process of you learning the skills you need to learn in order to pass the certification are what become your defining success factor in your career. When you're able to learn all these new skills, new techniques, new ways of building workflows, you provide your value in that. That manner and open up career best advancement for you. Cool. So I'm gonna keep on going, but that's really the why. And we're gonna skip over real quick. So we talked about micro credentials, but I'm gonna click here on Designer Desktop now. We talked about the micro credentials, but now you see this certification path and hopefully this is the one that puts it all in context to each other that I've been talking about. The only one that I haven't mentioned so far is this predictive master, which is on the level of expert. So Designer core, again, equal to the four micro credentials. If, if you want even a kind of a running. If you want a slow start, you could do the foundation. It's really a great micro, micro credential to start with, to even see if you're in the realm what I would say. And this is something that I had, you know, when I started and took my first Designer Core exam. The. The person at the time said, don't think of the certification as an end all be all, but use it as a learning tool. And this is probably the Best advice I can give you through this webinar is don't take the exam with the intent that you can only pass. It's not. You're taking the exam with the idea that you're going to validate what you know and don't know. If you take it that way and you happen to fail the first time, great. That's great. And it's great because you now know definitively what you know and what you don't know. And that's really a hard thing sometimes, especially in. In the tech world in general. If you think about languages and you think about, you know, learning other tools, it's sometimes very hard for you to know, where do I really stand? Can I call myself an expert? Can I do I really think, think of myself as advanced? Many times users think they're way more advanced than they really are. They haven't built up the skills that they really need to be at that advanced level. So what I think and I value and I trust is that Alteryx certification gives you that line in the sand saying, hey, if you pass Designer core, I trust that you are able to open Alteryx, build a workflow. You might not to be able to build everything yet. You might have some challenges and need some help, that's fine. But I know that you started to learn the same language. But I know Advanced and expert. Anybody who passes the designer expert, true expert, true expert, they know the Altercy world in really well in depth, so won't spend much more time on that. But that's the path all the exams are here available to take. The. The one thing I will get you to notice is the micro credentials. Notice they were about an hour or so. When we get into the core, it goes up to two and a half hours. So it's significantly, much more time. But that's also because it's almost twice as many questions. So a little bit more robust of a test. The questions are mostly in specific formats and I'll share that with you in a little bit, but they're much more comprehensive. Okay, so that's core in advance as well. And I know this is all about core, but I'm trying to get you to think about, hey, let's get you to core, get certified, and then go right into practicing for Advanced and Expert. You know, I want you all to become Alteryx experts. The other thing to know, and this is one of the reasons why I harp on, just take the test. Don't get stuck up on the fact that you have to pass or fail. It's free. There's no money coming out of your pocket. Just take it. If you fail, all you have to do is wait seven days to take it again. And that's more than enough time for you to round out or figure out what areas you needed to focus on. Do that and get going. All right. And take it again. Again. Advanced is free as well. So only when you get to expert and predictive are they there's a cost involved. All right, so we covered certif certification exams. Let's find my mouse and we. I want to move over. I'm going to jump right into the course certification exam prep. So one, one thing I'll show you real quick how to get this. If you get into some in micro credentials. Let's go to the core. If we go into the core, there's this prep guide link right here. I put it as part of the resources. But this prep guide is what I'm going to use as the bible for today's session as as far as how do we prepare for to pass the course certification. And that's what we have right here. This should be something you download and keep very close. I'm going to walk through the elements here and explain them and talk through them so that you have very clear guidance on what to use. I'm also going to add a few things in that I think are valuable as we go through to just help make this really valuable for you. So I talked about time the test. One thing that you want to pay attention to is the version here. The version is really important. Alteryx puts out multiple versions a year, every year. And you want to make sure you're at least to that version. So if you, if you're going to take the exam, it's possible that there's a question on the exam that pertains to the, the latest version that we're, we're testing on. So for example, if you have a 20.1 or 21.1 or 2 version, you might miss a question because it's not something that is valid to that version. Very, very important. Again, every day. 80 all multiple choice practical application matching multiple response. The core certification is distinctly different than the advance or the expert in that it's, it's more focused on multiple choice. When you get in an advance and expert, there's a little bit more of the practical application. They're still there but it's a higher, higher amount of questions are less multiple choice and more practical application. Okay. This is all stuff that you can read through. It's it's just the about stuff. What I really want to get into is the, the blueprint summary and the core stuff that you need to, to pass. And I want to talk through this in a good level detail and then this is the what I've talked about why. But we'll do the what now and then I'm going to get you a list of resources that will help you to approach the what of the certification. So we're looking at the blueprint summary. So there's a couple of things. You notice that there's four pieces to the core blueprint. You should be in your head also thinking, oh, he also showed me the four micro credentials for the core exam. And so that's something that you can kind of make equivalent if you will to study. If you need to break these down, that's one way you can go about it. All right, so these four areas, general designer, knowledge optimization, input output data and preparation, blend data and parse and transform data, all make up the column subject areas or the focus areas for this exam. Right now the way that I think is actually easier for me is what you're seeing now is the 23 tools that are on the core exam. For me, Ultrix is a very practical tool. It is something I can touch, I can manipulate, I can work with. And so going after sort of theoretical ideas about things is hard for me personally. But being able to say, okay, I need to understand the browse tool, let me go and work with the browse tool, get my hands dirty, play with it, figure it out. What I do wrong, what do I do right? That's going to be a lot better learning for me. And I know some are like that, the same that it's not just reading the material, you have to apply it. And that's one of my biggest tips for you today when you're going after any of the certifications is there is no amount of playing with the data, playing with Alteryx that will make it not use advantageous to you. The more you, you go and use the tools, the more fluent you're going to be, the easier those questions get because they're going to, they're, they're going to give you the information that you need to understand. Okay, so these 23 tools, now keep this in mind because I'm going to show you some resources that will directly help you to, to take this approach and excuse me, go after the individual tools. Now the last thing I'll touch on, these are all tools that are. There's two things to think about There are only a couple tools within that tool palette and that tool palette like in and out or parse or documentation. They are not the whole palette. So this is important because you don't need to over study either. You don't need to know every single tool in that palette to be able to pass the core certification. You can if you want, but it's not necessary. Preparation tool. There are tons of them. These are the eight that you need to know. Join tool or Join Palette and the Transform palette as well. Okay, Keep that in mind. Now we're going to talk and cover a lot of the, the learning part of it and then I'll talk a little bit about the practice exam and then you would take your test. This is all kind of useful information for you, but this is all stuff that you can kind of keep your, keep yourself honest when you're, when you're going through and, and doing it. So the practice exam is great. I wouldn't shy away from being able to take it. Me personally. When we think about test taking strategies and do we take all the practice tests up front and then figure out what we need to learn and then go take the test or do we study a little bit first, then take the practice exam and then fine tune and go take the test? I kind of subscribe to the second strategy. I think you should go out, learn as much as you can to a point where you think you feel comfortable. You know those tools, you can talk to them very cleanly and clearly. You built workflows with those tools. You've done the study everything. Because your practice exam is going. It's going to basically tell you what you already know that you don't know enough. Go study, learn as much as you can. Go through all the requirements of the certification, what's on the certification. With all the resources I'll give you today, you'll have more than enough to get through that. Then take your practice exam and only focus. Don't go studying back all the stuff you know. Only focus on the stuff that you know you need to really get good at and make sure that you're really solid so that when you take your test you kind of come into it being confident that you've got all those things. Your comp, your level of confidence when you take a test is super important. People dismiss this. When you go in there, you're always going to be nervous. You're taking a test, you're supposed to be nervous. But if you're confident that you know your material, you've taken a Practice exam that says, hey, you pretty much know your material, then that level of confidence will grow and it will actually help you to pass the test and do well. Okay, now let's get into one tool examples. I want to show you this real quick because it's really, really, really important. I think there was never enough of this here. Got learning Pass. Where's my. I'm just going to do this. I'm going to go right into it. So in Alteryx Designer, when you open it, there is a place where you can actually go and learn about each one of those individual 23 individual tools. If you go into help sample workflows and then learn one tool at a time, you have everything you, you need here. So if we go and we saw that the very first tool was the browse tool, and you need to know how to use a browse tool. It's a very important tool, hence why it's on the certification. If you come here and open up, what we've done here is we have a sample workflow and all the descriptions for that entire that tool, right? So this is the browse tool, right? We can run this workflow and we can see exactly what it's doing for us. Okay, so I'm just gonna put this back just for a second so you see the whole picture. But this is just one tool and it's showing you, it talks about the specific capabilities that you have in that tool, right? So we could view a data table, right? So I'm viewing a data table in our results window. I could view profile data. So if I, if I double click on this, I get the profile over here, I can see all the, the profile of the data, right? This is something that the browse tool provides you, right? Now if I wanted to. Let's pin this guy. If I wanted to view report data, I could click on the report and see, see a report that was created, right? That is something that the browse tool provides you. So I think you get the idea. Even spatial data is a cool way to do it. The browse tool being very, very, very powerful. But my point here is in these individual1tool examples, you can start to see that there's a good level of information that is provided to you and broken down to a level that is very practical and usable. And I really challenge you to take this and make it your own. So if you're learning how to use the input tool, take this Excel file and build your own workflows off of it, you can just right click copy and we'll do it for you. Just to see that you can do this, you can copy this. Go open a new workflow. Right click paste. Now you have the start of a workflow based off of the example that was provided you for that one tool. So you can start to play and, you know, go through the motions of understanding what you need to do and how you, you know, try to break it. Try to figure out, okay, how do I, yeah, how do I solve this problem? Right? These are, these are things that, that you can do to be, to be really good at that one tool, right? You have one tool examples for all the tools that you need for the core exam. So for this one, again, sample help sample workflows. Learn one tool at a time. Okay, that's the one tool examples. Okay, let's get to the other one. Keeping track on time. Okay. All right, here we go. All right. So we talked about one tool examples. Help documentation is really, really good for me personally. So Help documentation, again, is second to none. It is a very, very valuable resource. But again, I personally am not one that does well by just reading through, you know, lots of documentation. I use documentation when I absolutely need it to figure out a specific bit of information. I don't personally use it as a study tool, but I want you to know that it's there and it's available if you are. If that's something that you, you want and you need, you can literally again go to, you can go to HELP for a hundred different ways. You can go up to here and you can get Alteryx help. You can actually in the tools, anytime you see these sort of, It's a question mark with a circle around it. You have it there. You can actually click on that and it will take you to the documentation page for that individual tool. So you can get to it super easy, you know, and that's the case for all the, all the individual tools. It will give you a relatively high level, but it's very agnostic information, right? It's not going to be specific to maybe your use case or your situation. If you have a challenge, a problem, this is going to be very general information about that tool. But maybe this is what helps you. So I include it there. Okay. Now we talked about help documentation. That's their tool mastery index is an amazing, amazing resource. This was probably one of those ones that I know myself and many other Aces and Alteryx experts used religiously because it takes the tools and it provides a deep dive into, as deep as you can go into that specific tool and topic Right. And this is an article that will give you a lot of the information that you need to be successful with that tool and essentially master that tool. There's a lot of information here, so it can be overwhelming. And again, consider what type of learner you are. Consider what type of how your mind works. And if reading a bunch of stuff and you have laser guided focus, then this is a great way for you to go into it and get really in depth. Follow all the steps, think through all the different bits of information that are there. Fantastic. Some of you are going to be more video oriented and you know, visual and you need something to watch or listen to. There's plenty of that. I'll show you that in a second. But for the folks that like you got help documentation, tool mastery is really great because it's going to show you things that you might actually not get in the tool mastery or the one tool examples in Alteryx Samples and the Alteryx help where tool mastery goes much deeper into the reasons why they work the way they work. It'll talk about certain concepts, sometimes in depth, that are hiding beneath the tool, make the tool work the way they work. So if you really are one of those ones like me that I just have to know every little thing about it, all the features, all the functions to the nth degree, Tool mastery is your place to go. The link is copied into the resources. Again, if we, if we go back to the main index. So just know that there is a tool mastery index in regards to all of them. All the tools that you need, plus more for the course certification are in the tool mastery. Okay, so if that's you, if that works for you, there's plenty of tools that have an individual page for it. Very, very valuable resource. So I'm again, I'm following along with the coursert exam prep guide. So the links to all of those are in there as well. We've included them in, in the webinar today. But I want to make sure that you don't have any sort of challenges there. There's a couple pieces here I'm going to touch on. So there's, there is the, the learning pass. I'm going to jump ahead to the course because I want to talk about some other stuff here. We talked about certification exams. There is a page for certification resources you saw when we went to the academy. Here you have this link right here. Certification resources. This is all stuff that you might want in the process of doing it. The prep guides are here. There's a really, really good list of FAQs that if you wanted to, you know, understand what's the time, length, when can you retake it, answer basic questions that will be there. Again, the link to the prep guide is here for all of the certifications including the designer Core Micro credentials. Those are all available to you. There's under certification resources. Again, this link has been provided to you as well. Now for those who are maybe more like me, I need something to do, interact, click, touch, watch. Something more engaging. I've got an attention span of a gnat. So I need something that's a lot more engaging than just read a document. And this is where there's two main resources I'm going to, I'm going to share with you. Actually I'm going to give you three today. Three ones that have really helped me in my certification path. And for those who need something a little bit more interactive, the first thing is this getting started. So it's going to say that I need to sign in. But each of these, this getting started learning path, they're all sort of vignettes and click throughs, but that are a little bit more engaging and I like them a lot because you're gonna learn the same information, maybe a little bit more, maybe more tangential information like what is data, that sort of thing. But they're highly engaging. They require you to kind of click through stuff and be more interactive. And so this learning path is really great because it covers all the different sections that you would need for the core certification. Okay, so that's, that's available too as well. The getting started path. What I will say the, for me personally, what the most valuable thing again is getting your hands dirty, getting your hands on it is weekly challenges. I can't overemphasize enough of how valuable weekly challenges are. Now the certification team recommends the same and they say, you know, we talked about the interactive lessons, but the weekly challenges are a highly valuable way to go. And I'm going to talk about it and show it to you. But so much so that they've actually provided a list of weekly challenges that are tied to the core preparation course. Certification Preparation. Right. So when you go out to the weekly challenges, you notice that they got the different links here, but there are hundreds. And I think we're getting up into, we've, we've had to open another page because we've gone beyond 300. So I think we're in 4 or 500 now. But the, they've been going on for years and they're all relatively simple and Easy to understand problems, not always easy to solve. Some of them are excruciatingly tough and require a lot of time. But some of them are really just basic challenges that say, give you a problem to solve, gives you a data set. And then your job is to go into Alteryx, pull into that, pull that data in and solve the problem based on your understanding. Now what's great about this is you get that tactile sort of approach. You get to, to play with it, you get to kind of break it as we joke around. Like, you get to figure out what works and what doesn't. And that's a really great way to learn. But what I think is most valuable is it's goal directed. It's directed you have in your head to get after a certain result or goal. And that's what makes the weekly challenges so fun, is that, you know, you kind of put that, you know, internal pressure on yourself to solve that problem. And in doing that, you're going to learn, you're going to learn a lot better. So I highly recommend you going through and working through all these different challenges. There are plenty for you just real quick to kind of help you to get to where you, you want to. You can take the link in the prep exam, that's fine. But you can also just look here and see if it says core. That's one I would take. Foundation is before core. So if you see that I would, and you haven't taken yet, I would put that in the, in the mix as well. But any of these, foundation, core I would go after. Right. But notice when you, once you pass the core exam, you can go on, do some for advanced, even expert certification. Right. So all the weekly challenges are there and available for it. Okay. Really, really valuable. All right, last piece here. We've got weekly challenges. We do have a course. So for those of you who are again, need more visual stimulation, they need to see things or even hear things, maybe more audio, auditory. We do have a course here that you, you can take and take a, take a class and it'll go through all the, the same concepts and topics that you need. But I'm going to give a really huge plug to my good friends at Data Camp because I just have to say, like, they've done such a phenomenal job at putting together a track. So a group of courses that are all around Alteryx Fundamentals. This Alteryx Fundamentals. There's a couple things here that are really, really important to call out. First of all, it starts at the level of no Expectation. Right. Which is really important. I wrote a book with O'Reilly and I did the same thing. You can get that book on Amazon. But really the main idea is that it starts with the assumption that you've never seen Alteryx before. And to me, if you're teaching fundamentals or you're teaching towards a core exam of that beginner level, then you need to start from ground zero. And a lot of places don't do that. So kudos. They started ground zero. They also have stuff broken out into courses, so it's more bite size, it's more structured. It's also not in a blur face pace, like super fast. They take their time to make sure, you know, two hours, three hours to get across the material. Not trying to, you know, cut corners. It's pretty thorough. And the last one is some of my best friends in the world are teaching it. There is very few people in the world that can go against Dina Sanchez and some of the other folks that all these folks know their material. Kim Hands is absolute rock star. So there are taught by people who, who knows what Alteryx is all about and, and that you can trust in what they're teaching you. They, they haven't just, you know, Dina's been using Alteryx almost as long as anybody, so 15, 16 years, something maybe, maybe more than that. She's gonna, she'll keep me honest, but very, very one of the top experts in the world. So really high quality material. Good cover the right topics and taught by experts that, you know, I trust myself. Richie. I don't know. I know we're about 45 after. I want to give you a time or two to say anything you wanted to about Datacamp's Alteryx courses. Yeah.

So thank you for the kind words about the Ultrix Fundamentals track. Yeah, there was lot of hard work went into that and it does align very closely with the Alteryx certifications. It's designed to help you pass. So I think between the Data Camp courses, all the resources on the Alteryx site, and of course, Joshua, your book as well, I think like, people ought to have enough learning resources to be able to pass these certifications. So we're going to go to audience questions in a moment. If you've got any questions for Joshua, please do ask them in the chat. Now, Joshua, was there anything else you wanted to say before we go to questions or.

No. So I think we covered all the pieces. The last thing I'll just show you, I think we've covered most of it, but if you need a Little bit more detailed breakdown for the certification. Basically the last page of the certification prep guide has it. So you should. This is probably the one piece that I would guide your belief in what you know and don't know. Can you, you know, for example, identify Ultrix native file formats? That should be for, for an advanced user, expert user. That should be right off the tongue. That should be fairly easy to, to say. So if you're struggling with that, mark it down as something to get a little bit more fluent with. If you're, you know, going through and you're, you're having a challenge in interpreting common data types, that's something that you know should be relatively fluent with. And in order to be able to answer those questions, can you perform Union joins and appends? Those are all individual tools that you want to be able to master, use a tool mastery, go through the lessons. But the outcome that you're looking for is that if you are given maybe a weekly challenge that says, hey, Union, these two data sets, you don't even blink an eye. You bring the Union tool down, you connect the two or three or ten data sources and you're able to configure that correctly. Like that sort of level of fluency, you don't have to know all the different ways to do it, but you should be able to bring the tool down, configure it and get it to work. That'll help you tremendously. So that is the show. I think we've covered all the different components, but if there's any questions, I'll be more than happy to take a look at the, the questions and answer any of those or feel free to reach out to me in any of the forums, LinkedIn, whatever. I'm more than happy to help you out and work through it and talk, talk to you about passing it.

Excellent. Thank you, Joshua. That was brilliant, like very thorough. So I'm hoping people are going to be feeling a little more confident about working towards the certifications and then taking me back. Before we get to audience questions, I've got a couple of questions for you. So I guess just how long do you expect it takes to go from zero to that first certification, then through to all the next certifications up to expert, like what's the sort of estimated time pathway?

So there you will hear a lot of stories, especially if in your bigger companies and there's a certification sort of culture there, there's many stories where people took it in the first week and they passed. Does take a little bit of work and I would say that for me, if you, you know, did two weeks of solid work, meaning this is two weeks worth, not quit your day job and just go study certifications. But if you put In a good two weeks of work, say 80 hours, roughly, this is my, this is my assessment, my time, you should be fine to pass core. That is, if you know the material, you can answer those questions and you're fluent with, you know, the concepts and pieces. But I don't think it's, it's an astronomical ask. It's a good amount. Again, the core certification isn't trying to prove that you're God's gift to the universe when it comes to altering. That's left for the expert. Core is saying, hey, can you get into alter? Can you use it? Could you build a workflow? You know, the, the, the getting out of the gate sort of approach. Now when we get into advanced and expert, those are good, challenging exams. I would plan on more than a month, couple months. Most of the people that I know who have passed the expert cert, it's frankly, it's only offered, you know, it was only offered once a year for a while. So people would take a whole year to practice and study and not stress themselves out. But if you wanted to go balls of wall, it's going to be multiple months. It also has a level of expectation that you've been using Alteryx for a good number of years. Don't think you're going to be an expert in two months or three months. Maybe you learn a bunch of things. But there's so much to know and learn about Alteryx that you got to give yourself some time.

Okay, so 80 hours seems like quite a reasonable sort of thing just to get that first step, a year for the expert. That's a, that's a serious exam.

No joke. It is. That is the reason why there's only, I think 40, maybe 50 that have passed it in the world. So it is a very illustrious exam to, to pass and it's very difficult. There's many experts that I know, know their stuff that have taken it two or three times. And that's fine. It's flipping hard test, but it's, it's very worth it.

Okay, all right. And so you mentioned. So there's these 23 different tools people need to know. And some of the exam questions, they're on just individual tools. I know once you start stringing tools together, there's often different ways of solving things. How much flexibility do you have when you come to answer these questions?

Yeah, how much flexibility in what ways?

Like in being able to answer things in different ways.

Yeah, so it's actually a really good point. This is just a topic in general that users sometimes are taken back by, is that the certification has a very hard job. It has a hard job to make sure that you know the foundations of the tools and the aspect of it. But most people come to find that an Alteryx workflow can be built 500 different ways, 5,000 different ways. It's very, very flexible. So what certification is going to focus on is do you know how to use that tool in the way that it's built so that you can build, you know, the, the creative workflow that you, you want? You're going to have questions that ask you, hey, what is the, what is the configuration value here or the here, can you do this or that? What is missing sort of thing? Those are all things that are geared more towards the tool and the configuration, the functionality, than saying, okay, build a workflow that has these four tools. Like, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's, that's not going to test your, your ability to, you know, drag and drop the tool, configure it, make sure that it works.

Okay, all right. And are there any parts of the certification that are trickiest, like, where do people make mistakes? Or like, what's the most common reason for failure?

I think they're, I'll give you mine. When you're taking the certification, their job is for you to know the, the tools and the configurations, different aspects of. There's configuration items that are outside of the workflow, like user settings and stuff. There's a level of depth there that you need to pay attention to. It is not all about the fact that you can drag a join tool, connect two data sets and select the join key. That could work and, and help you to, to build a join in Alteryx. What you're going to get tested on is most likely that next layer. What else could you do? What other type, hey, what other type of joins? You know, and this is stuff that as a data developer in general, you need to know. You need to know there's more than just a inner join. There's, you know, how do you do an outer joint? So that what I would say is when you get to a tool, just because you got it to work initially doesn't mean you're exam ready. You need to be able to use all the different components and functionality within the tool so that you're dynamic enough to answer any of the Questions that come at you.

Okay, yeah. So really dig into all the different options within any of the given tools. All right.

Which the tool mastery, the weekly challenges and the, the one tool examples all help you with.

Okay, excellent. And yes, certainly the joins, there's a few different types of joins and all sorts of different options. So yeah, plenty of different types of.

Unions, you know, different configurations for unions. So. Yep.

All right, so let's go to some of the audience questions. So Kadir asks like who's actually using Alteryx and I guess relate to that. Who, who cares about the certifications?

Yeah, so great question by the way. You're not going to like the answer. It's everybody because there is no. Alteryx is not domain specific, it's not industry specific. We literally have customers in every domain from the sciences to the government to big banks to big four product companies, you name it. Anything in between oil and gas, it's all there. Where there is a group of analysts or anyone that touches data, Alteryx becomes a useful product for them and in various capacities. There are some organizations where their IT department uses us religiously to manage a lot of their processes. Data processes. There are many financial groups, there are many finance groups within other companies, hr product management. Their supply chain is a big one. Like it's used across all industries, all, all sort of landscapes within, within the world, even education and, and you know, non profit organizations.

Okay, that's interesting that it goes beyond just the data team. It's also things like IT teams and those sort of semi quantitative teams like. Well, I suppose finance is pretty quantitative but like something that, like supply chain where it's a bit of logistics and.

Yeah, that's actually how I started. I was on the supply chain data team at Nike. So that's where I got my start with Alteryx. And I couldn't have, I can't imagine me having done it any other way. I would have died from exhaustion because it's a, it was a lot of work if it wasn't for Alteryx. So very, very useful in supply chain for sure.

Okay, excellent. And just the second part of the question just felt like who cares about the certification? So is the certification something that human resources teams are going to know about or in general who's going to be caring that you got the certification?

Usually I would say yes. And it's likely because when we introduce Alteryx into a company, we put a high precedent on getting certified resources from us. We know the value of the exams, we know they're good exams, we know that they are valuable to an HR or hiring manager. So we try to educate them as their growing their Alteryx team or their data team that, hey, look out for Alteryx core. Alteryx Advanced expert certifications. Right. So we were there. We showcase the value to our users all the time. Hence we're doing a webinar to make sure that they understand that the value of certification is increasing steadily. It is a way to cut through a lot of the noise of, of trying to figure out who knows what, you know, when you have that certification on your resume.

All right, excellent. So we're coming to time. Just got time for a couple of inspirational comments from the audience. So Michael says, I strongly recommend getting Josh's books. A fantastic ultra resource. So good stuff. I think one for a lot of people to read. And also think I've got my sights on the expert certification. So yeah, it sounds like it's a pretty exclusive club, so go for it. Oh, actually we do have, we do have one more question. So we'll do one. One quick question before we wrap up then. So can you talk about how alteryx compares to business intelligence platforms?

Yeah, let me see. The question was, all right, oh, use is how alteryx is useful comparing with Tableau, Power bi. Got it. So the way that I will think about it in short form is alteryx is a data tool. We work on data, we manipulate data. We don't, in generic terms, think of ourselves as a visualization tool, which is what Tableau and Power BI are. They. Their core competency is visualization. Our core competency is the data pipeline is from the point that the data is in a database to the point that it gets to the visualization or it gets to an output of some sort like an API call or it pushes into a data source, whatever. We work on the data side, cleaning up data. I am a huge advocate and I will stake my. Put my stake in the ground on this one is you use the tools for what their core competency is Tableau. Their core competency is not data preparation. I know they have some features and functions. They are an amazing software. So is Power bi. Amazing software, but it sits in visualization. Now here's where it becomes interesting. Alteryx can connect and output to those formats. So one of the benefits that you get from learning alteryx is you can manipulate your data, get your data to what we call lean and mean and clean, and you can output or export that into tableau formats or Power BI formats or frankly many other Qlikview and others. That works best with them. And that in generic in the bi world is a best practice is you use the tools what they're made for and you work with the data cleanup and tableau. Tableau for example. I've done years and years of development there and I've led teams there. Tableau works better when the data is cleaned up and made for that visualization. You don't want to be doing all that work in your visualization because it slows it down. Same thing is you don't want to use Alteryx for all the visualization when you have those amazing capabilities. We work right alongside each other very fluently.

Different parts of the workflow. Prepare your data first and then Alteryx. Then visualize it in something else. We're well past time now. Once again, thank you, Joshua. That was really good stuff.

Stuff.

Before everyone dashes off, we've got two sessions on doing data analytics with Data Data Lab and also with Chat GPT. You can see how the sort of the. The tools fit together. Please do sign up for the future events as a QR code at the top left. Hope to see you all next week. Yeah, thanks again, Joshua. Great stuff as always.

Appreciate it. All right.

Cool. Thank you to recent moderating. Thank you to everyone who asked questions. Thank you to everyone who showed up today.