CyberShu

GCP - Associate Cloud Engineer - How to certificate

 
  • Oct 02, 2021

I have started working with Google Cloud Platform almost one year ago. It was my first serious contact with developing on cloud. I liked it and decided to speed up my personal development.

Why have I choose to start certification path from this certificate? Why I even bother to spend me time and energy on learning?

There is an opinion on the IT market that certificates are worth little. That’s a partially true. Some of them are worthless like Udemy certifications, however there are such that they have discernible value.

In my opinion we are surfing on the big wave of Cloud computing. More and more companies are migrating to public clouds like AWS, Azure, GCP. So, cloud specialists are in great demand. Certification was a motivation for me to get to know well Google Cloud products and be more productive. I see certification as extra motivation for learning. Usually, the certificate scope includes a defined material. It took me a while to prepare a curated list of resources for preparing for a first engineering certificate - Associate Cloud Engineer .

My client - Lingaro is GCP partner, so I got extra accesses to learning platforms like QwikLabs where I was learning ropes step by step on GCP platform. If you work with company which see value in investing in employees, then you can ask for financing and get it for free. I asked and got a ticket.

Education path

The most important link is Associate Cloud Engineer - main page, where you can find up-to-date materials, learning paths.

The current guide you can find on link.

It’s recommended having at least 6 months experience with GCP. It only recommendation, not obligations. Is generally good tip, because It’s a huge product, with a big amount of terms, details.

✋ Always remember to compare information from articles, books and recordings with official documentation

If you create account on GCP, you get extra credits (300zl around for a year). Its enough for small projects, play with tools.

Exam

I decided for an online proctored exam conducted by Kryterion. Don’t expect a modern web application and great UI. It’s a old website, but it was working ;)

First, I filled form, paid for exam and scheduled. You should save the date and time (time zone!), because cancelling and rescheduling is costly.

Before start answering, you have to show your face, everything around and inside your desk. No one else should be in the same room. You should remove all notes, notebooks etc. I wear glasses, so I had to show them from each angle. Generally, they are super serious.

Exam can take max 2h, but I finished after 45minutes and spend like 30minutes on reviewing answers. You can skip questions and come back later If you are not sure what’s the right answer.

Questions are tricky. They are usually a business case description and you have to decide which solution might be better in financial, operation, technical terms. You can find in question which criteria you should be considerated.

After you finish exam, you get a first confirmation if you passed or failed. You won’t get more details. After a few days, you will receive an official confirmation from Google and certificate number which you can register on aspecial page with list of certificated engineers.

My certification manager from Lingaro suggested posting an article on LinkedIn about passed exam and link a Dan Sullivan (author official GCP guide book) and GCP manager on Poland - Marta Matysiak. You can see my post on https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michmzr_career-gcp-cloud-activity-6810806355046256640-qo6C

Contact

I hope what I wrote is useful :). Please leave any comments to let me know. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me directly on:

You can also find my posts on my second blog Geekowojażer.pl

Book

Awesome lists

Visualizations

Example exams

QwikLabs courses

Notes

Youtube

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