Hello all,
I just passed the exam earlier today. From what I can remember, these are the things I found the exam was heavy on:
Everything that you can possible do with SSH
GKE (How to setup, use, edit)
App Engine (Just everything)
IAM Questions (Cloud Identity etc.) + Firewall Rules
VPC Config / Shared VPC
Some CIDR questions where you have to calculate how many IPs you need (know your basic Networking)
GCE + Instance Groups/Templates
I found I could eliminate 1 or 2 answers easily for each of the questions. I got one multiple choice answer out of the 50 questions. About 10-15 questions were challenging to me. For the rest of the questions, I felt very confident in my answers.
Overall, I would say that this exam was easy if you prepared correctly. Even if you don’t know the answer, you should be able to knock out the wrong answers confidently.
Things I used to study:
ACG ACE Course
Coursera ACE Course (5 part course – includes a lot of QwikLabs! – found this to be the most useful due to labs)
ACG + Google’s Practice Exams
Udemy Practice Questions (I got about 200 questions to practice with)
I was able to do the ACG ACE Course and the Coursera courses within their 7 day free trial so no excuse if you’re broke like me lol
Some questions I have:
1. The exam only gave me a ‘pass’ result at the very end. Do I ever find out the score? How long does it take to get the actual badge/credential ID? **Update: Got the certificate in my email the very next day
2. Can I start preparing for the PCA cert right away? From what I hear, it is 5-10x harder than this ACE exam and the exam guide say’s a few years of work experience recommended. Some guidance here would be appreciated.
3. I haven’t really started any job searches but can I land any jobs with this cert alone? (I do have work experience in the IT field but not in the cloud)
1 Answers
Congratulations, nice work on passing your exam! That’s a really cool outcome, and it’s really awesome that you went into it and felt so confident with the very vast majority of your answers. That’s a tribute to your efforts made studying! And like you say, the amount of effort you put in makes a lot of difference when it comes to the crunch time of the exam.
It can take up to 7-10 days for Google to finalize your results (I sat and passed my ACE 4 days ago, and still waiting on the confirmation). Once that’s done, they send out the details and confirmation in an email with all of the details. I’ll make a note to come back to this thread and let you know how long it ends up taking for me.
I haven’t looked much into the GCP Professional Collaboration Engineer certification, but those are mostly guidelines. If you have a background in Collaboration technologies or related areas, you’ll find it easier than others potentially. All difficulty is relative to your personal experience.
On looking for work, it can definitely be a challenge when you’re trying to build experience. And unfortunately, the certification doesn’t bypass that need; although it does help. Depending on your experience in IT, you might be able to find your way into roles related to the Cloud, or in companies who are using GCP already
Thanks Stephen! And I got the certificate email the very next day!
And sorry, I meant to say Professional Cloud Architect. Not PCE
Ah-hah, nice! On the PCA, I know Mattias has mentioned that some students can go into the PCA with a very strong foundation from their ACE studies. It largely also comes down to if you feel like you’re ready, or if you need a bit of a break from studying, as it can get very tiring too!
Congratulations Kal. How did you find the Udemy practice questions? I’ve had a look at them on the Udemy site and the reviews are mixed. What are you thoughts on them?
They aren’t the best but they definitely help when you go over 200 of them!