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DBT Certificate reflections and lessons learned

  • Writer: Digital Hive
    Digital Hive
  • Sep 8, 2025
  • 4 min read

After my first year of working with dbt at Digital Hive I was encouraged as part of my growth path to take the dbt Analytics Engineering Certification Exam dbt Analytics engineer certification exam | dbt Labs and passed. As with most exams, things are never as they seem. With this blog I want to provide future exam participants with some pointers that could help them improve their preparation process for the exam.



Background

My background in biomedical sciences and bioinformatics has led me to start a professional career as a data engineer in the pharma and life sciences sector. Although it has been 3 years since I first came across dbt, I have only been intensively using it for the past year. While working on different projects, I managed to stay up to date with the latest dbt developments. This helped me a lot when I started my current project. Here it is the core tool. Hence, my first advice to anyone that is currently not working with dbt but wants to use it, is to stay up to date with the high-level developments and changes. This will keep the familiarity with the tool alive and prevent concepts and terms from fading from your memory even if they are not used on a daily basis.


Why did I take the exam

Besides the fact that certificates serve as confirmation of a person's competence in using a tool/platform, they can also be a great motivator to dive into the less used and more detailed features of that tool. After all the thrill of passing an IT exam comes quite close to that of passing your average college or university exams. By preparing and studying for the dbt exam you get insights into the structure of the documentation, and even if not all the topics are relevant, you will become familiar with navigating through it, which on its own is a great skill to acquire.


Learning the exact commands and object names may be boring, but it helps you describe your methods and solutions accurately. As a result, you won't always need to look up tool-specific terms online. These aspects come back during the exam when you have to recall terms under stress and limited time.


Setting up the study schedule

This part of preparing for the exam is crucial and very personal. For me, even though I had already worked with dbt for a year I planned to study for at least an hour a day three weeks in advance. As the saying goes “repetition is the mother of learning”.

A large part of the exam comes down to memorizable theory that is packaged in not only multiple-choice question but also Fill-in-the-blank, Matching, Hotspot, Build list and in my opinion the most challenging Discrete Option Multiple Choice (DOMC).


More practical knowledge is also tested on the exam. Therefore, one should make sure to set up the features that will be part of the examination (see study guide) at least once on a local learning project.


Make a schedule that covers all topics and combine specific topics to memorize documentation with trying out the features. The documents that are suggested as reading material reflect the values and thought process that are important for a dbt Analytical engineer. This is smoothing to always keep in the back of your mind and not to skip!


The study resources

Up to today there is only one major resource besides the documentation and dbt learn paths that are referred to in the study guide namely, the dbt community on qanalabs.com . The qanalabs.com dbt community provides a comprehensive and up to date collection of mock exam questions with detailed explanations.


Since I prefer to write my own summaries, I am not affected by the ongoing issue of limited access to condensed course materials. This will probably be resolved as soon as dbt grows in popularity. But for those who try to refrain as much as possible from taking their own notes qanalabs.com provides excellent and broad explanation on every topic the questions cover. Take into account that these are not ordered according to the study guide so you will need to organize that yourself.


In short preparing for the exam is not self evident and requires great attention to detail if you do not want have a blank sport in your knowledge and leave exam questions unanswered. 


*(very important please read this several times in detail before starting to plan your study or even think about purchasing the exam voucher)


Booking the exam voucher

Read the study guide, this may have changed by the time you are reading this 😊.


The exam

Besides the different types of questions that make up the exam it does not differ from any mainstream proctored online exam. Except for two points that I noticed with the platform that maintains the proctoring talview.com (previously examity.com) was used


The first point of attention is that there is no pre-exam test link, so make sure to go through the documentation on what to do before the start of the exam Learner : Proctoring & Certification Support.


The second point of attention is that the exam will start only at the exact moment you scheduled it so opening the link and doing the identity and surroundings check too early will result in an awkward and silent moment with you looking into the camera.

During the exam it’s handy to flag the questions that you can't answer immediately or that are very time consuming (DOMC questions) and keep them for the end. Also make sure to read the questions correctly and review all your answers at least once!


Final notes

I can recommend the following blog for more resource detailed information regarding the exam.



If you still feel unsure and need to talk to someone or if you have specific questions. qanalabs.com has a comment section for the study exams where people frequently discuss their ideas and get question answered by the content maintainers.






Written by Aslan Hattukai

Data Engineer





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