I passed several Google Cloud Professional certs in Q1, 2024 and several people asked me how I tackled it, so here is my quick guide. Most of this applies to all the cloud platforms.

In total, I believe I’ve done in excess of 35 new or recertification exams in the last 12 years and I’ve probably failed about 6 or 7 I suspect. I’ve been AWS SA Pro since 2014 and GCP Pro since 2017, pretty much when they were both first available.

This is how i do it:

1. Interact. You won’t pass an exam watching videos alone. My best advice is to login and start clicking. You don’t have to press “Create” at the end or spend money to do so. Explore the options. Simply getting a feel for the flow and interacting with the UX bakes in the knowledge.
2. Watch. Do watch videos, better yet, “play along”. Most of the providers have high quality professional content on their respective site. I want to call out https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/ which is outstanding for videos. Some of it is behind paywall but if you work for a partner, perhaps not. Alternately, simply take the 30d free option. I used this and paid for one further month ($29 / £23) and the two months was more than sufficient for 3 pro exams. The $299 annual fee for this is great value given it includes a $200 exam voucher. I think this and the provider videos in general are better value than Pluralsight and similar, but I would use the latter and Coursera etc for non-cloud specific training (like ML maths)
3. Labs. Again, shout out to Cloudskills boost, the Qwiklabs are fantastic for familiarisation and of the highest quality on the cloud console. Microsoft and Amazon have similar partner portals, but it seems to me that Google’s qwiklabs are head and shoulders abover the rest.
4. Habit and Schedule. Book the exam 4-6 weeks away and put in the calendar. This forces the issue! If circumstances conspire against you, just reschedule, it’s usually pretty easy. Then create or commit to a daily habit of studying. I endeavour to do about 20-30 minutes a day learning, usually before starting work. I use a “streaks” app to keep myself accountable. I don’t worry too much about “what” I do, so long as it is exam related. Sometimes I read blogs, do a qwiklab, or do some skillsboost modules.
   
   I currently have a 44 day learning streak, so roughly 20-22 hours of studying in the last 6 weeks towards my next cert.
   
5. Practice. You can’t go into the exam with practicing questions. I strongly recommend doing the official example questions, as usually one or two of them feature in similar form on the real exam. Personally, I’ve used Whizlabs for many years and do their questions sets. About 1 week out from the exam, my daily habit often turns into rattling through the questions and where I get things wrong, i follow up the doc links. i usually redo the questions multiple times so there is a bit of muscle memory.

Good Luck! See you in the proctored exam hall!