I guess the answer might have been obvious – come to this acloud.guru first before writing the exam!!!
I did read the Sybex "Google Cloud Associate Study Guide" twice and did’t have any problems with the book questions, nor the online practice exams.
I completed all the recommended by Google: "Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure" Coursera course and passed the Official Google Cloud Associate Practice Exam without any problem.
I also have built some infrastructure for my team at work using GCP, but not that extensively yet.
However I found out none of that material was enough to prepare me for the difficulty level of the actual GCP Associate Engineer Exam.
None of the practice materials I used had scenario-type questions or that asked you "based on the Google Recommendations" or the "quickest/easiest way" to do something. Also I found many times that the answers were really close so it was hard to get to the right answer by elimination. Finally the questions were much broader in scope and covered more technologies in depth than was presented in the prep materials
That being said, I still was feeling confident that I was going to pass when I submitted my exam, and was a bit surprised by the "fail". Since you only get a pass/fail and no other feedback, I’m not sure where to go now to plug in the holes in my knowledge before I try again…
I guess my best bet is to start with the training here and all the forum feedback from those who passed the exam.
(As an aside, I’ve passed the Cisco CCNA, CCVP, and the CCIE Collaboration written twice – failed the practical, as well as my PMP exam. This Google Cloud Associate was harder than any of them in my opinion).
1 Answers
Really sorry to hear that, that’s one tough outcome! You’re right, it’s not an easy exam, and goes pretty deep into certain things, and covering your understanding of how things should be done; and sometimes there are multiple answers that could work, but the last qualifier for the question is really important to fill that gap on which answer you need to choose.
Hopefully you find this course helpful! Personally, I found it great at tackling at GCP ACE (biased staff member, but still), and when you follow along and take part in the challenge labs, it really takes that time to bed the knowledge down. Coming from a Cisco background, you’ll probably find some of the networking tech fascinating since it’s leveraging a lot of Google’s internally developed tech (fun fact, we also have just released the preview of our Professional Cloud Network Engineer course, if you’re interested after your ACE!)
So in summary, welcome to ACG, and we hope you find that the ACE course gets you over the line!