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Community Blog A Beginner's Guide to Alibaba Cloud Professional Certification Exams

A Beginner's Guide to Alibaba Cloud Professional Certification Exams

This article introduces Alibaba Cloud Professional Certificate Exams and explains how to take them on PearsonVue.

What Is an Alibaba Cloud Professional Certificate?

Alibaba Cloud professional certifications cover the complete portfolio of products and solutions for major domains within the IT industry. In order to validate and demonstrate a user's ability to work in each domain, the professional certifications prepare you to tackle the industry's toughest positions to help reach your full potential.

Alibaba Cloud professional certifications give industry-endorsed advantages by providing a broad range of exams based on product categories, user growth stages, and job requirements. Let’s take a look at how it benefits both groups!

  • Individuals: Earn certifications that prove you are professional in the corresponding technical field, can solve practical problems based on Alibaba Cloud products, and get more employment opportunities in the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem.
  • Organizations: Alibaba Cloud professional certifications can help you cultivate and tap professional talents, improve the organization's cloud technology capabilities, and obtain more business opportunities from Alibaba Cloud ecological projects.

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Three Tiers of Alibaba Cloud Professional Certifications

  1. Alibaba Cloud Associate (ACA): Foundational certification for cloud practitioners and beginners with zero to some experience with the cloud
  2. Alibaba Cloud Professional (ACP): Professional certification for experienced cloud architects, engineers, developers, and operators
  3. Alibaba Cloud Expert (ACE): An expert qualification for those highly skilled in cloud technology

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Categories of Alibaba Cloud Professional Certifications

As of March 2023, Alibaba Cloud offers 16 certifications across three difficulty levels. You’ll find a role-based visual overall certifications scheme below:

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Alibaba Cloud Professional Certificate Exam Types

  • ACA Cloud Computing Certification: Whether you are a cloud beginner or already working in the field, this exam will be a great place to start. It tests some of the essential services that can be provided by Alibaba Cloud (such as ECS, OSS, SLB, and RDS).
  • ACA Cloud Security Certification: This is a popular domain in the field that checks if you are familiar with tools like Server Guard, WAF, and Anti-DDoS Basic and Pro.
  • ACA Big Data Certification: This exam focuses on DataHub, Flink, AIACC, PAI-DSW, and a series of processing methods that store, calculate, count, analyze, and process massive amounts of data on the cloud.
  • ACA Cloud-Native Certification: This exam tests your ability to build cloud-native infrastructure frameworks through Alibaba Cloud's core container-based products and grasp the logic behind cloud-native technology and assess its business value.
  • ACA System Operator Certification: This exam aims to assess your overall ability in a systems administrator or system operator role
  • ACA Developer Certification: This exam requires programming skills and cloud experience. It is suitable for coders and IT technicians.
  • ACA Database Certification: This exam is recommended for data experts familiar with TP, AP, NoSQL, tools, and other general database technologies.
  • ACA Business User Certification Exam: This exam is for company individuals that work in a cloud environment with finance, management, sales, or IT. It highlights the could skills from each field.
  • ACP Cloud Computing Certification: This exam is designed to assess your grasp on Alibaba Cloud ECS, SLB, OSS, RDS, Auto Scaling, Security Solutions, and other cloud technologies
  • ACP Cloud Security Certification: This exam is oriented to architects, developers, and O&M personnel that use Alibaba Cloud security products. It covers Alibaba Cloud's core products in security, monitoring, and management.
  • ACP Big Data Certification: This exam is designed for big experts, integrating distributed computing, high-concurrency processing, high-availability processing, clustering, and real-time computing.
  • ACP DevOps Engineer Certification: This exam is for developers and operational experts working with Kubernetes Container Service (ACK), the ARMS Prometheus monitoring service, Log Service, ActionTrail, and Container Registry.
  • ACP Container Service Certification: This exam tests your mastery of the orchestration of containers and deployment of applications with Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK).
  • ACP Cloud Networking Certification: This is a relatively new exam intended for IT professionals that want to focus on Alibaba Cloud software-defined networking.
  • ACE Cloud Computing Certification: This is a three-hour, 150-question exam for you to showcase advanced technical skills and high familiarity with Alibaba Cloud.
  • ACE Big Data Certification: This is also a three-hour, 150-question exam for high-level Big Data Architects, Data Analysts, and Data Scientists.

Taking the Online Exam

Step 1: Purchase an Exam License Code

You can purchase the exam on the Alibaba Cloud Academy official website. As of March 2023, ACA and ACP exams are 120 USD each and ACE exam is 168 USD. Visit the detail page of your preferred exam, click Buy Now, and complete the payment.

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You will receive an email with the exam code after your payment is confirmed.

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Step 2: Reserve Your Exam on PearsonVue

Alibaba Cloud is working with the exam provider PearsonVue to facilitate candidates to complete exams. You will need an account on Pearson VUE to register for Alibaba Cloud certification exams. Visit the Pearson VUE official website and input a username, password, and security question to create an account (if you don’t have one).

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After you create an account, you can sign in and see the exam dashboard. Click View exams and select the exam you want to take.

Note: You can choose Japanese or English as your exam language for some types.

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Choose Online at my home or office to take the online exam. Remember to conduct a System test to check your equipment before starting the exam.

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Select a time and date:

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Step 3: Redeem Your Exam Code

When you proceed to checkout on PearsonVue, you can’t pay on the exam platform. You have already paid on the Alibaba Cloud Academy Certification page and received your license code previously, but you need to redeem it.

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You have finished registering for the exam!

We have also prepared an additional detailed Registration Guide for Taking Exams on Pearson VUE that explains the exam location, exam date, and how to change the schedule.

Exam Preparation

Alibaba Cloud Academy offers Professional Certification Exam preparation for certain exams. You can conduct self-paced learning by accessing this website. You can also find sample questions and a guide on the exam details page.

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Other online materials include Clouders, which allow you to get a quick take on a certain cloud topic and usually take less than an hour. Short videos offer key takeaways on a wide range of topics, including Alibaba product functions, cloud skills, and trending topics. Specialties deep-dive into a trending topic. It’s a perfect way to test your knowledge in a specific domain (such as data science or cloud migration). Like Clouders, Specialties also include courses and certification exams. However, Specialties are categorized learning paths that usually go beyond a few hours of content.

All of the courses above (like cloud computing, security, database, and DevOps) will be free if you subscribe to an Alibaba Cloud Academy Membership for only 19.99 USD per year. The membership provides unlimited access to all e-learning materials, including professional exam preparation courses.

Conclusion

Professional certifications are the highest-level certification Alibaba Cloud offers and wholly demonstrate a user's Alibaba Cloud capability. It unlocks career potential and demonstrates your job readiness to employers. The certification courses prepare customers, partners, and developers to tackle cloud solutions with Alibaba Cloud products. The badges earned can also be transferred to your resume, which benefits professional development.

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We will continue posting exam-related blogs. If you are interested, please follow us to learn more information! If you have any questions or suggestions, please visit our website to learn more about our exam offerings and services or email us (intl_training@list.alibaba-inc.com). We wish you a happy certifying journey in Alibaba Cloud!

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Alibaba Cloud_Academy

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Comments

Kidd Ip March 9, 2023 at 1:03 am

Nice sharing, keep learning!

Alibaba Cloud_Academy

61 posts | 51 followers

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