Associate Data Practitioner vs Professional Data Engineer

Should you take the Associate Data Practitioner exam before the Professional Data Engineer exam? This is one of the most common questions I get asked.

I usually have a pretty straightforward answer: just take the Professional Data Engineer exam.

Contrary to what Google says, the Associate level exams, such as the Associate Data Practitioner exam, are actually not that much easier than the Professional exams.

I get the sense that the teams or people in Google who are responsible for developing each exam do so pretty much on their own, without much coordination with the other exam designers. It's not like Google has a person or a team ensuring the appropriate difference in difficulty between each Associate exam and each Professional exam.

What ends up happening, then, as a result, is that the Associate level exams are not actually that much easier. I'm not saying they're just as hard as the Professional level exams, but they are not that much easier.

So in my opinion, if you're going to put in the effort to get the Associate Data Practitioner, you might as well study a little more and get a Professional Data Engineer exam, which is more valuable.

This is especially worth doing if you know you have a course or a set of materials/resources which, if followed, will reliably teach you the relevant concepts and business problems.

That is the case with my Professional Data Engineer course. As of this publication, my course has a 100% pass rate since it was launched two years ago.

When you think about it, the kinds of Google Cloud services, and data concepts, that you'll need to learn to pass the Associate Data Practitioner exam, you will also need to know to pass the Professional Data Engineer exam. So why not study for the Professional Data Engineer exam and learn even more?