My Notes on the Google Cloud Business Professional Accreditation
A course and test to take on your own time that could be a start to understanding Google Cloud.
This accreditation is no more available!
Google seems to have removed this towards the end of December 2020. Existing accreditation links seem to be live.
Plug: Subscribe to my YouTube channel that teaches you to apply Google Cloud to your projects and also prepare for the certifications: youtube.com/AwesomeGCP. Check out the playlists I currently have for Associate Cloud Engineer, Professional Architect, Professional Data Engineer, Professional Cloud Developer, Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, Professional Cloud Network Engineer, and Professional Cloud Security Engineer.
Over the last few months I have been conducting a few Google Cloud sales sessions across multiple geographies with attendees from Australia to western USA. The audience is primarily from a sales and pre-sales background. One of the frequent questions I got was whether there is a Google Cloud certification similar to the technical certifications, but for those from a business background. Short answer: there isn’t, but.
If I remember right, Google Cloud did experiment with a Business Essentials certificate. However, that didn’t eventually see the light of day, it seems. Some of the courses meant for that are no more available or some along those lines are still available in some form or the other on Coursera and Pluralsight.
What is there, though, is a Business Professional Accreditation. I went through it to understand what it is about and to give guidance to this audience. These are my notes on trying out this course and test.
- This is not a certificate similar to the tech certificates.
- It is free.
- The tests/exam can be taken as many times as you want until you pass.
- There are four sections to learn.
- There are three sections with a 30 minute test each, with 30 or 35 questions.
- You need to get 80% at least in each section to pass.
- I went directly for the tests. But you don’t get the accreditation until you get through the course also, which of course, is easily done by scrolling to the bottom of each course page.
- I didn’t get an email after completion.
- The accreditation is part of your profile on the skillshop site. For example, see mine here: https://skillshop.exceedlms.com/student/award/62820155
- The accreditation doesn’t seem to have an expiry date.
Value of the Accreditation
I wouldn’t attach much value to this accreditation. Because you can try it as many times as you want. You could even have somebody else answer the questions for you. This one is hardly any better than any of the online courses with a completion certification. It wouldn’t carry much value with an employer.
However, if you are new to Google Cloud and if you are from a sales or pre-sales team, this could be a milestone at the beginning that gives you some knowledge and confidence.
If anything, you should be going through this course for your own learning and not for the final accreditation.
Type of Questions
The questions on the exam are quite high level. They are all multiple choice questions. Product fitment from a compute and storage perspective is the primary focus. For example, what would be the product to use with containerized workloads (answer: Kubernetes, though Cloud Run and App Engine Flex are also options now). Or what product would be best for a mobile and web backend (answer: Firebase)? There are questions like what are containers and what is a Virtual Private Cloud. And others that check your understanding of the terms reliability, availability, etc. These would be very familiar and easy for any one who has some exposure to Google Cloud already. For those without that experience, the course that goes with this accreditation should be good enough. The course has been quite nicely laid out.
However, there are multiple issues with the questions. Some of the questions are outdated. In my opinion, it is also missing key topics like migration planning and cost management. It definitely hasn’t received much attention in the recent past. In a few cases, the answer options weren’t very good in my opinion. There were even some grammatical errors occasionally. Even with a fairly good knowledge of Google Cloud at this level, I got only 80% on one section. That’s 6 wrong out of 30. It’s true that I wasn’t taking the test very seriously and was just going through it quickly to find out what it is about, but even then, I consider that number quite high. My personal opinion is that it is because some of the questions and answer options were weird. You should also try it and let me know your opinion about the questions. My guess is that the questions are based exactly on some point made in the course, which, honestly, I did not go through.
Course and Test Link
You can go here to sign in for the course and exams: https://skillshop.exceedlms.com/student/path/7325-google-cloud-platform-business-professional-accreditation#
Notes from each of my exams
For those appearing for the various certification exams, here is a list of sanitized notes (no direct question, only general topics) about the exam.
Overall notes across all GCP certification exams
Notes from the Professional Cloud Architect exam
Notes from the beta Professional Cloud Developer exam
Notes from the Professional Data Engineer exam
Notes from the Associate Cloud Engineer exam
Notes from the beta Professional Cloud Network Engineer Exam
Notes from the beta Professional Cloud Security Engineer Exam
Notes from the Professional Collaboration Engineer Exam
Notes from the Professional DevOps Engineer Exam
Github Repo
A collection of posts, videos, courses, qwiklabs, and other exam details for all technical certification exams: https://github.com/sathishvj/awesome-gcp-certifications
youtube.com/AwesomeGCP
I’ve been making videos on applying Google Cloud and preparing for the exams. You can subscribe to the channel here:
Wish you the very best with your Google Cloud learning. You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
