Cloud Certifications: GC Associate Cloud Engineer

While Google Cloud’s revenue base is lower than that of Microsoft and Amazon, its growth rate is higher, according to a recent April 2020 analysis by cloudwars.co. This has put Google Cloud certifications in the spotlight lately, with employers showing increasing interest in certified GC professionals. This guide provides information and resources on the entry-level GC Associate Cloud Engineer certification.

This certification is for engineers beginning to work with GC to deploy apps, monitor operations, and manage enterprise solutions. You should be able to use Google Cloud Console and the command-line interface to perform common platform-based tasks to maintain deployed solutions that leverage Google-managed services (PaaS/SaaS) or self-managed services (IaaS) on Google Cloud.

If you have extensive experience with other cloud providers or on-premises solutions but are still at the early stages of deploying and managing solutions with GC, and haven't acquired a wide breadth of hands-on skills with GC yet, this certification is also a good fit for you.

This certification provides value and confidence to both employers and employees working with GC by validating and demonstrating an individual's ability to:

To earn this certification, you need to pass a single exam:

The exam's format is multiple choice and multiple select, and can be taken either remotely (online-proctored) or at a testing center (onsite-proctored).

There are no prerequisites for taking this exam. However, it is recommended by Google that you have 6+ months hands-on experience with Google Cloud products and solutions.

The following skills are within the scope of the exam:

Below are some resources to help you prepare for the exam:

In a 2020 Tech Salary Report by tech career website Dice, Cloud Engineer was the third highest paying occupation in 2019 with an average salary of US$128,347, an increase of 5.2% from the previous year.

When it comes to the career prospects and impact of getting certified with GC, survey responses from Google's own 2020 Google Cloud Certification Impact Report indicate that:

As of this writing this certification is the only GC associate-level certification, which is described by Google as "focused on the fundamental skills of deploying, monitoring, and maintaining projects on Google Cloud", and that it is "a good starting point for those new to cloud and can be used as a path to professional level certifications". It isn't, however, a prerequisite for any of the professional certifications.

Since there are no prerequisites for taking the certification exam, and since it is not itself a prerequisite for any others, this certification is not part of a larger certification path.

The GC Associate Cloud Engineer certification is an entry-level certification for engineers beginning to work with Google Cloud. Ideally, you would take it with the recommended six months (or more) of experience working with GC. With Google Cloud's growth paired with growing demand for cloud engineers--one of the top-paying tech occupations currently--this certification can be of great value by boosting your credibility and impacting your career prospects in a positive way.

With no prerequisites for the exam and with all the great training resources available (listed above), passing the exam and earning the certification shouldn't be a very difficult achievement. That being said, here are a few tips that will help guarantee your success: