Pass the Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer Exam (2023)

3 min readOct 22, 2022

Hey everyone, I hope you all are doing well. Recently, I passed the very famous Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer certification exam. In this article, I will share the strategy and resources that helped me achieve this.

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About the exam

The Professional Data Engineer exam assesses your ability to:

Design data processing systems
Operationalize machine learning models
Ensure solution quality
Build and operationalize data processing systems

The exam price is $200 and the duration is 2 hours. You can expect 50 questions to be answered within the given time.

My Background

I have been tinkering around Google Cloud services for the past 2 years and am working as a Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps Engineer. This ensured that my work experience also contributed to the knowledge base I possess which helped me with understanding Google Cloud at a detailed level. Since I hadn’t been working on data services, I had to make an extra effort to learn about data engineering.

Preparation Strategy

I had been preparing for all the data-related exams together for around 2 months. So I made a parallel approach to learning for the certifications.

Visit the Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer page on Google. This will give you an overview of the exam and what is required to complete the certification.
Understand what the exam is all about. Visit the exam guide to see the contents in detail. You will get a solid understanding of the content you will need to prepare for the exam.
Visit the official Google Cloud Platform documentation to clearly understand each of the GCP services. These would make your GCP knowledge but you still have another essential factor to cover: “Hands-on experience”.

“No technical certification in the world will be useful for you if you don’t know how to implement it in the real world scenario.”

Exam Experience

Since I don’t have a good working experience in data, I only had a brief understanding of the services and how it works at a high level. Maybe due to that reason, the exam for me was very tough. I thought I was going to fail as I found it difficult to comprehend the questions and the options to match them together and find the correct answer.

I had to re-read the questions and the options before answering and flagged the questions which I didn’t know. After I completed the first cycle, I came back to the flagged questions and spent time answering those questions. After answering all the questions, I reviewed the questions again and changed some of the answers I chose earlier, due to confusion. My heart was beating high the whole time as I was nearing submission. It was only after I saw the PASS result that I was able to breathe in relief.