Hooray. Congratulate me 😀. With a busy schedule, a full life and some constant (self) pressure to perform better, I have achieved a new success at the end of 2024. I earned the certification called SnowPro Core, by the company Snowflake. How did I do it? How did my learning journey look? And how did I manage to succeed at an exam for a technology I haven’t heard about before? I will answer to all of this below.
First of all, I have to admit. Discipline helped me a lot. I would love to tell you how in fact it was truly easy, but my truth is that this required methodic planning and consequent study. Learning an unfamiliar technology is not something to do on a whim.
How did I prepare?
Some strategic planning helped me get to my goal. First, I spent time to get a glimpse of all possible materials to study from, all formats – written, videos, video-courses, practice labs, practice tests etc. Then, after filtering and sorting (what I perceived as quality was definitely subjective), I set up a list of materials I want to go through. Then, I scheduled dedicated time for studying daily. The format of the content studied was varied – from articles, to video courses, to practice quizzes. I thought to mix formats to reduce the “boredom” that might appear.
Then, after consuming a good amount of the planned content, I got to practice tests to see how I score. I decided to do this once I was about 60-70% confident that I would pass the exam. I believe it to be a good time to start self evaluation, and later repeat the process as you gain more knowledge. There are lots of practice tests online for most technical exams, some are free, some are paid. But I think it’s important to first spend a good time in accumulating knowledge before you test yourself. If you start with tests and zero knowledge, this could lead to low scores on your first tests, which might be discouraging or demotivating.
Sometimes, programming concepts might be difficult to grasp without actual practice running code, trying to understand how it acts and why. There is a clear difference between learning in a theoretical mode and learning in a practical mode when it comes to coding. Each of us has their own preferred ways to learn. But each exam also has its own particularities and structure, and I believe that this is also a major factor that people should take into account when signing up for it. In my personal experience with this specific Snowflake exam, I did not consider necessary to incorporate very practical, lab-style learning. I thought the theoretical concepts and few code examples given by trainers in various materials were enough. And, as it turns out, my passed exam is (I hope) a good enough proof that at least for my particular case, it worked well.
A little personal context though, that has an impact in the final result of such an exam: I have long term experience with software development, mostly web development. I have never heard of Snowflake before the company I work at strongly encouraged us to get certified with them. But for an adjacent area, I would say my SQL knowledge is somewhat above average (7 or 8 out of 10), and I have basic knowledge about all of the major cloud providers, with some wider expertise in AWS. And I think these particular skills are good contributors towards a successful Snowflake certification.
But let’s look at things in a more concrete, practical way. Let’s discuss some digits. I love digits. Don’t you?
Digits
I managed to do all of this with clean, consistent planning and commitment, also helped by monitoring and documenting the whole process. Even though I prepared for other technical certifications in the past, now the documenting of the learning process was a premiere for me, and I want to share it. I have it ready to be shared with others in an Excel, but I’ll just wrap it here with a summary.
My plan set to spend at least 1 hour per day learning. My total preparation time was 54 hours of learning and training. These hours were added up from around 3 weeks. During this process, I constantly refined the resources I used – sometimes added more materials to study, sometimes removed other materials from the list, but most often I added. In its final form, the plan had 57 hours of content to be consumed. Few items ended up ignored on the plan, because as I said, I spent a total of only 54 hours to prepare. Including practice tests and every little item put into this learning process. Everything was measured.
Conclusion
And since I passed with a score of 80% (a minimum score for passing was 75%), I consider myself happy to have this extra badge added to my professional belt.
What I earned? I am now a developer with a better background into data, with base-level knowledge on how to use Snowflake within their UI, what are its main features and value propositions, and I have a better grasp on the main flows and operations within a data warehouse, and what concepts are frequent in the big data domain.
Since data is a subject that I think will become stronger and stronger in the tech world as time goes by, either by itself or as the foundation on which AI lays, I think a certified expert in this area could be a helpful contributor in future projects.
I suggest you look up Snowflake as a tech, at least to see its value propositions – data collaboration, scalability and performance, all in a multi-cloud platform built for flexibility, supporting various workloads from data warehousing and lakehouse architectures to AI/ML and analytics.
And if you ever decide to take get certified with one of their available exams, I hope this gave you a bit of insight into how it works.
Resources for learning
Snowflake playlist – Data Engineering Simplified YouTube Channel
Snowflake SQL Knowledge playlist – Data Engineering Simplified YouTube Channel
LevelUp Series – free course on the learn.snowflake.com platform, available once you create an account and login (first link)
SnowPro Core Certification – Pluralsight Course path (paid)
SnowPro Certification playlist – Data Engineering Simplified YouTube Channel
Snowflake Cerfication Practice Test & Question Dumps – 2023 – Data Engineering Simplified YouTube Channel
Free Practice tests – example questions and answers
ExamTopics – SnowPro core exam sample questions
Tips
- Exercise summarization on any material you consume. I used a .doc file to write short extracts from every other material I consumed, or to copy paste images that evoked a concept in a visually nice way. This document helped me reduce the big volume of information to a smaller document, more compact and with (I hope) more essential ideas, that were easier to revisit. It was very handy to have such document to read in the last 2-3 days of the exam, when stress and fatigue come up and you may not have the energy to re-take other long-format courses or materials. For tens of hours for video/written materials, it was very good to have them compressed into a…48 pages of a .doc, in this case. When creating this document, I thought about: What would I like to have available to read in a hurry, if I only had ~2-3 hours to study for this exam?. Or you can also think about it this way: how would I summarize all I’ve learned, in a way that helps me re-solidify knowledge but with less time? Think of it like the “fast and short course”. Sometimes you may forget where a specific concept was presented in a video and you might want to come back to it. This way, with a written document, that problem solved itself out – as a text document always has a “find” function, in any digital platform you may be.
- Then, I recommend to play with visual elements. For example in the document mentioned above, change fonts, colors, text size and styles to emphasize ideas, concepts, key words. Whatever catches your eye. Add colors that help making mental links or help re-solidifying an idea. I also encourage copy-pasting images or screenshots from videos too, if the image helps you memorize concept. Make it your playground, do not limit it to text – use tables, charts, diagrams, any visual element that tickles your brain the right way. For me, a good example were tree-like graphic structures. It helped me to grasp the hierarchical relationship between concepts. When having a new concept to learn, there is a risk of many confusions between terms. I’ll paste an example below of a tree graph that helped me. So basically, I recommend to just use any visual bells and whistles might help you create better mental links and solidify information.
(image source: Data Engineering Simplified YouTube channel)