CBIP certified professional - third paper update

Finally gave my third paper - data management. And guess what, I passed. Just missed the mastery level by a whisker. But its fine. Overall, I think the exam was tough and I did well.

I took the exam by remote proctoring. I am not sure of the extent of control of your laptop that the proctor has, I mean, to what extent he checks on programs open on your laptop/pc. I played it safe and didn't have any reading material on the laptop or paper. Anyway, there is hardly any time to refer to notes as you have to answer 110 questions in 90 minutes. That's less than a minute for a question.

Some of the questions didn't make sense, but overall the exam did test your knowledge of the domain quite rigorously. I have jotted down areas that are not that common but brought about a lot of questions. Will write in subsequent posts.

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CBIP preparation - my experience

Recently took 2 papers of CBIP. CBIP is Certified Business Intelligence Professional. You can specialize in a number of streams - details here but you have to take 2 main papers - Core exam and Data warehousing.

Core exam is about general IT fundaes - software engineering, hardware, program management, processes, system design etc.
Data warehousing about the basics of data warehousing which any BI professional would be expected to know.

Though I was relatively free and had loads of time for preparation, let me tell you it is extremely hard to prepare. One, because the scope is vast. You are not expected to deep dive, but cover a lot of different areas and topics. There is lot of stuff that you would obviously know, but then there would be some basic terminology that you might have forgotten or never come across due to the nature of your work. eg. RAID (in networking), SDRAM, Gantt chart etc. So, you do have to ensure you cover all those subject areas and atleast get a basic understanding of these terminologies. But again, due to the questions being multiple choice and mostly of the nature, "What is XYZ NOT used for?", you just can't rely on the basic understanding but actually have to go into the details as well. Thats why I am in a major confused state during the preparation - to skim over to cover all the topics or get into the details to ensure you can trick those trick questions.

Overall, I would rate the tests as tough. It will be difficult to pass without ANY preparation, even though you might be top of the class IT and BI professional. With a week's preparation, it is easy to pass, though to get the MASTERY level (70%) in each test, 2 week full time preparation is mandatory.

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