# Old guide: Tableau Certified Associate Consultant Exam 2021: Certification

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2021-05-10
- **Format:** Video · 19 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Certification, Career
- **Tools:** Tableau (calculated fields, server)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/old-guide-tableau-certified-associate-consultant-exam-2021-certification
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NbtH6LT3gA

I review the Tableau Certified Associate Consultant exam I sat last week, a partner-only certification required since 2021 for consultants working with Tableau. I walk through the exam guide, format, scoring, the five domains it covers, and my own results, flagging the big gotcha that it's a closed-book exam.

## Key takeaways

- The Certified Associate Consultant exam is partner-only and became a requirement in January for consultants working on behalf of Tableau partners.
- Unlike many other Tableau exams, this one is closed-book — no access to Tableau, the internet or even pen and paper, so you must work calculations out in your head.
- The exam is 55 items over 90 minutes, scored on a scaled basis out of 1000 with a 750 pass mark, delivered via Pearson Vue at a test centre or online.
- Content spans five weighted domains covering discovery and scoping, dashboard design, data preparation, calculations, and publishing/enablement — testing the whole Tableau platform, not one product.
- Results arrive almost immediately by email, but there's no per-domain breakdown of how you performed, which I'd like to see added.

## Chapters

- 0:00 The Tableau certification landscape
- 1:09 What a Tableau partner is
- 2:18 Exam guide and learning resources
- 5:06 Exam format and scoring
- 6:03 The closed-book challenge
- 8:18 The five exam domains
- 13:38 Sample questions and results
- 17:11 My remaining certification plans

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/old-guide-tableau-certified-associate-consultant-exam-2021-certification

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena