How I passed Google Cloud Digital Leader Certification Exam

Recently I attended Google Cloud Migration Summit and received a Google Cloud Digital Leader Certification voucher. In this post, I will share the experience and resource link I used for exam preparation.

The Exam Experience

I purchased the exam with the voucher from https://www.webassessor.com/ powered by Kryterion. I had chosen the Monday 10 AM slot. The reason behind choosing Monday is, that I planned to revise the course on the weekend and give the exam on Monday with a morning fresh mind without cluttering thoughts about new office work. I had chosen the Online Proctored exam that can be given from home. There is an Exam Center option available as well.

I used my personal laptop. It is not recommended to use the office laptop as it needs to install one secure browser software, where the exam will be conducted. The exam link was enabled 10 min before the schedule. One support person was assigned. I did the biometrics before the exam. During the exam also, I had to click one photograph. It needs to display one Government ID card where the name should match the registration form. With the laptop camera, the 4 walls of the room and the workplace (where the laptop is kept) needed to be shown. I have a secondary monitor in a stand, I just rotated the secondary monitor’s backside and covered it with a piece of cloth.

The exam started in a secure browser. 50 questions, 1.5 hours time. It went well for 15 min. the secure browser is white and I am a dark theme person (I use a dark theme in OS, dark reader chrome extension for making all websites dark) so I was having strain in my eyes but it was manageable. After 15 minutes, my exam paused. The message came, “Your exam is paused, the support person will contact you shortly”. I looked for 5 min on the screen… no change there. Suddenly one message pops up, “There is some issue with your video feed, it got stopped. Please exit the exam, restart your machine and restart the exam. Your time will not be counted during this time and the exam will be resumed where form it stopped. Details have been sent to your registered email id”. I quickly followed the instruction and restarted the exam. I had to show all the walls again (no need to show ID this time). In the meantime I just speed up my fan, I was literally sweating due to this event. The exam started where from it was paused. I haven’t faced any issues after that.

I was preparing for the ACE so the question looks comparatively easy. A few months back I have given the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Foundation Exam so I had a basic idea about Cloud Concepts. The questions are not technical. The exam will check if you are aware of the different Google Services. Most of the questions are scenario based.

Some of the answers I didn’t know. The elimination method helps in those cases. Find the keyword and try to find what should not be the answer.

Resources I used

• Official GCP Certification Guide – You will get a fair idea of the topics covered in the course and the percentage of the question you will get in the exam.
• I got the Google Cloud Skills Boost (previously named Qwiklabs) portal access with my company email id. That was my initial learning resource. The Google Course Instructure delivers the course contents so it was very nice and relevant.
• If you don’t get access to Google Cloud Skills Boost, you can try Coursera. You can go to the individual course and can audit the course without charges.
• Udemy course by Ranga Karnam. If you have the corporate Udemy license then you can enjoy the free course content. This is a very good course to clear the concepts. The shorter version is available on YouTube as well.
• CDL Andrew Brown Video – Feels like it’s a bit old and not matched with the current exam pattern still a very good video to clear GCP concepts. You can definitely watch at 1.5x speed if you have time.
• Exampro Free Practice Exam – There are 3 more paid practice exams but I have availed myself of only the free one. Registration is free and no need to enter any payment details. You will get a feel of how the exam will going to be. After the free attempt, you can check the answers with a good explanation.
• CloudGirl Sketchnote – This is very interesting to present the GCP concepts in a cartoonish format. I like that.
• Google Cloud tools, each explained in under 2 minutes – There are small (less than 2 min) videos where from you get an idea about the different GCP services.
• Cloud Digital Leader Sample Questions – Get an idea of what will be the question pattern in the exam.
• Google Cloud Cheatsheet – Nice presentation of Google Cloud Services in short. The interactive view is nice but a better readable view is in List View.

Have basic Ideas regarding the below topics:
BigQuery, Cloud Bigtable, Pub/Sub, Cloud Spanner, DataWarehouse, DataLake, Anthos, GKE, Container, Firestore, SLA, SLO, Strategic Phase of Cloud Adoption Framework, Looker, Cloud SQL, App Engine, Cloud Storage (different storage class), Vertex AI, Vision API, Cyber Security (phishing, malware), Apigee, IAM, CapEx and OpEx, IoT, Scalability, Resource Hierarchy, Cloud Logger, Cloud Trace, DevOps, and SRE, Storage Transfer Service, Transfer Appliance, Artifact Registry, Container Registry, Cloud Build, Dataproc, Cloud Run, Greenfield, Brownfield, etc. I have just randomly written the topics which come to my mind. You can have a note and organize it.

Found one more link where you can get a free GCP certification voucher. https://inthecloud.withgoogle.com/pck-page/register.html. This is not yet tested by myself so I can’t give assurance if it works but looks like it should.

Here is what the certificate looks like. The certificate can be validated at https://www.credential.net/cdbcd9f7-513a-4899-976d-5dc795e6a2be

This is a very easy exam to pass and the certificate validity is 3 years. You can definitely pass the exam. All the best. Enjoy 🙂

You can have a look at my GCP ACE Certification Exam Experience.