Specialist Exam
Tableau offers three Tableau Desktop certifications that you can gain by taking an exam:
Desktop Specialist: $100 ($80 for students) - no expiration
Desktop Certified Associate - $250 - 2 years until expiration
Desktop Certified Professional - $600 - 3 years until expiration
As students, I’d highly recommend taking the Desktop Specialist exam when you feel ready and confident in your Tableau skills. Specialist certifications last your whole life, so it’s a really good investment and is an official marker of your knowledge in Tableau.
Tableau offers a great exam study guide to prepare: https://mkt.tableau.com/files/DesktopSpecialist_ExamGuide.pdf
The best preparation guide that I’ve come across is Christine Reitmann’s blog series on her weeks of preparation for the exam. She writes a blog post per topic that is recommended to learn for the exam. Her posts are also a great way to become more familiar with Tableau. She speaks in great detail and easy language about data connections, dimensions and measures, views, sets, filters, aggregations, formatting, and more. Check them out here: https://vizjockey.com/category/desktop-specialist-exam/
I took this exam and passed in January 2020. My top recommendations would be to look through the Exam Guide and Christine’s blogs, and then to really practice in Tableau. I was able to answer the questions quickly and confidently because I had been practicing with the Tableau interface almost every day. Knowing how dimensions and measures interact with each other, how data source connections work, formatting and defaults, and familiarity with building appropriate chart types is crucial. If you want to take this exam, start building in Tableau and reading blogs. If you can pay, Tableau’s e-learning Desktop I covers everything you need to know on the exam.