Alter Everything Podcast

AlteryxMatt

In this episode of Alter Everything, host Megan Bowers converses with George Salmon, a data consultant at Bulien. George shares his story of how he became Alteryx Advanced Certified in just 23 days! He provides valuable tips for upskilling and preparing for Alteryx certifications, including the use of interactive learning paths, weekly challenges, and community resources. George discusses his strategies, the importance of the Alteryx community, and his current projects at Bulien.

Panelists

George Salmon, Data Consultant @ Bulien - @martinson, LinkedIn
Megan Bowers, Sr. Content Manager @ Alteryx - @MeganBowers, LinkedIn

Topics

Ep 179 (YT thumb).png

Transcript

Episode Transcription

Ep 197 Zero to Advanced Certified in 23 days

[00:00:00] Introduction and Event Announcement

[00:00:00] Megan Bowers: Hey, Alter Everything. Listeners, we wanted to let you know that you can join fellow data lovers, analysts and innovators at the Alteryx Inspire 2025 conference. It's the analytics event of the year, happening May 12th through the 15th in Las Vegas. Head over to alteryx.com/inspire to register now. We would love to see you there.

[00:00:25] Meet George Salmon: From New User to Advanced Certified

[00:00:25] Megan Bowers: Welcome to Alter Everything, a podcast about data science and analytics culture. I'm Megan Bowers, and today I am talking with George Salmon, a data consultant at Bulien. In this episode, we chat about how he went from a new Alteryx user to advanced certified in just 23 days, and his tips for anyone looking to upskill and get certified.

Let's get started.

George, it's awesome to have you on our podcast today. Thanks for joining. Could you give a quick introduction to yourself for our listeners?

[00:00:58] George's Educational Background and Transition to Data Analytics

[00:00:58] George Salmon: Absolutely. So I'm George Salmon. I finished university very recently. I did an MSC in Financial and Computational Maths and before that, uh, degree in physics. I've always been more on the sort of math side of things, and recently I started a job with Boolean who are.

A small sort of data consultancy in Northeast England, and that's where I started using Alteryx.

[00:01:20] Megan Bowers: Awesome. I'd love to start off with hearing a little bit more about your background and your degree in computational math. How do you find that applicable in this transition into data analytics at Bulien?

[00:01:33] George Salmon: It is definitely been helpful. It's not directly related to Alteryx really. There was nothing really data, but there certainly was some predictive stuff. So the predictive tool set maybe, but the way I view it is the fundamentally the same sort of problems where you have point A, you have point B, that you're given sort of set of tools and you have to

Make that process. And you know, when I was doing maths, it was calculus and algebra, but now in Alteryx it's a select tool, the formula tool. But you know, I like to see them as fundamentally the same sort of problems.

[00:02:04] Megan Bowers: Definitely. And a lot of that same kind of problem solving skillset, would you say?

[00:02:10] George Salmon: Yeah, I think it's a certain way of thinking about things and it's something that you definitely get better at the more you do.

So I definitely say it's helped quite a lot. So I'm fortunate to be in a role where I get to use it almost every day. It, I really love doing it.

[00:02:24] Megan Bowers: That's awesome.

[00:02:25] Journey to Advanced Certification in 23 Days

[00:02:25] Megan Bowers: One of the main reasons I wanted to have you on our show was you went from really not knowing anything about Alteryx when you started your job to getting advanced certified in just 20 days.

So can you just walk us through that journey and what that was like for you?

[00:02:43] George Salmon: Yeah, that's an interesting story. I do have a caveat though, after I made the community post, I did have a look. My account, I assume was made on the Monday when I started, but it was actually made on the Friday before. So if you're being very technical about it, it is 23 days.

[00:02:59] Megan Bowers: Okay. Oh wow. 23 days. That's so much longer. Just ample time to get advanced certified.

[00:03:05] George Salmon: Yeah, and it was a really great journey.

[00:03:07] Learning Strategies and Resources

[00:03:07] George Salmon: I think I started off with the Getting Started Learning path, which is a really fantastic resource for people who have no idea what they're doing. I would definitely say that the first two chapters especially, and what I did is I started off by watching all those videos, and then I did all of the Foundation Weekly Challenges.

I think there's about 11 of them. After that, I took the test. Passed first time, which was, I was really happy with. I wasn't sure what to expect.

[00:03:30] Megan Bowers: The test for the core.

[00:03:32] George Salmon: Oh, the foundation or the foundation.

[00:03:35] Megan Bowers: Oh yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:36] George Salmon: And I wasn't actually expecting to pass it. First time. I thought it would be very difficult, but it is.

It's a really nice way of guiding you in. But then I moved over to Core where I took a slightly different approach instead of watching all the videos back to back, which was, I think, doable for foundation. 'cause there's not too much content for Core. I took a different approach where sort of. Did a video learn about tool and then implemented what I'd learned in a weekly challenge or something like that.

So after I finished that, I ended up doing a 38 core weekly challenges, which. I think is excessive, especially if your only goal is core certification. 38 is a bit overkill, but I think for me it was a really good thing to get the fundamentals down. Since I knew I was gonna be going to advanced, I wanted to be really comfortable with the core suite of tools.

And then I, yeah, I took the core certification exam, I passed that. I was really happy with myself 'cause I did it very quickly as well. I think it was 10 days or something like that.

[00:04:31] Challenges and Triumphs in Certification

[00:04:31] George Salmon: But then when I moved to the advanced, interestingly the . Website was undergoing some rebuilding or maintenance or something, so the learning paths weren't working at the time, which when it happened, I was like, oh God, how could this happen to me?

It's so terrible. I look back on it now. I think it was a really good thing overall. It forced me into a completely new way of learning, which I think is the main reason why I managed to pass so quickly and in instead of just watching a video and then implementing it, I would throw myself at a challenge.

Really not knowing what to expect. Failing a lot of trial and error, a lot of feeling really silly, browsing the community for solutions. But I think that was a really good way of learning. 'cause it forced me to stop and think every time I was doing something right, I got Google this, do I remember how to do that?

And that really made things stick in my brain. Decided to change my frame of mind when I was doing the challenges away from, this is something I've gotta do 'cause I've gotta get advanced certified 'cause of this job, which is a very, it's not, there's not much in it for me in that frame of reference. So I, I started viewing each challenge as like a new potential.

Almost like a mini hero's journey from a story. Whereas you go in, you dunno what to expect, you learn a load of new things, you fail over and over again, and at the end you, you come out and you learn something new. It was really enjoyable. Then when I took the exam on a Wednesday, I think it was, I ended up going 87%.

So I was really happy with that.

[00:06:00] Megan Bowers: That's really incredible. I mean, that's a really fast paced, upskilling and learning right there for sure. I. I like that perspective of viewing it as, what did you say? Like a hero's journey,

[00:06:11] George Salmon: Almost like a mini hero's journey. Yeah.

[00:06:13] Megan Bowers: Yeah. It makes it a little more fun and I know we have badges as you do more and more weekly challenges, so you're hiking the digital mountains part of, part of that journey and part of those little rewards and little fun things along the way.

But I think that's, that's really cool and huge encouragement to . To people looking to get their Alteryx certifications, to really look into those learning paths as well as the weekly challenges and, and really diving in, like you said, I've heard that from other Alteryx users too, like sometimes the best way.

To learn is to just go try it, learn by doing. You can't know what you don't know till you like get to a problem. So I think that's great advice as well.

[00:06:57] Tips for New Alteryx Users

[00:06:57] Megan Bowers: Were there any other like resources or strategies that you found valuable when you were preparing? When we chatted earlier, you mentioned using some more advanced techniques, even if it wasn't required.

[00:07:10] George Salmon: Absolutely. I guess the first place to start there would be interactive learning paths. They can be great. They certainly have their place. For me, the weekly challenges were far and away the best way of getting to grips with the designer. I think one thing that's maybe overlooked is I. As a skill is learning how to troubleshoot your issues.

That's something I think is really important, especially for the exam. It's open book, so you're allowed to have a look at community, have a look at the tool information, and learning how to navigate that quickly is definitely something I'd recommend. In terms of using things where they're not necessarily required?

Absolutely. Macros and apps, they are a really cool tool that you can use, but they're not necessarily used very often and when you're studying for the advanced certified exam, they're not gonna come up frequently enough for you to be at a high enough level quickly. And so what I would do is implement macros and apps.

In places where they're not required. 'cause a a, as you said earlier, the only way to really improve, or the, in my view, the best way to improve is by doing so. The more you use them, the better you get. And that also goes for regex. There's a great website as a resource that Regex 1 0 1 lets you test your regex code.

And for me, every time I came across. A situation where I just use a text of columns, I'd immediately ditched the text of columns, put the RegX tool in instead. If it took me five minutes longer, that will pay dividends in the future. Nice. Um, and then moving from that, this is more recently after I passed the exam, but.

I think it's probably just as applicable before you take the exam is doing solutions on the community. You get some really interesting problems there and it's super rewarding when someone accepts your solution. There's a great feeling. Another thing would be user groups. I know they're not available everywhere, but I've been to the Northeast user group.

Great place to meet people who are similarly minded. You can ask. These people questions, they're can have loads of experience that you can, that you can look at and you can use. And of course, working at Boolean, which is the company I'm with, they, they've got three ACEs I think. So being around a group of people like that has definitely helped me on my journey.

That's super valuable. Obviously not everyone is gonna have access to a team of three ACEs, but I think the community is definitely a, a good surrogate for that.

[00:09:27] Megan Bowers: If anyone can go on the community and post a question and have access to not just three, but many ACEs, top contributors, experts, and I love that our community is so responsive, and I totally agree.

Like you said, going in and taking that next step to actually try to solve questions is huge. It's rewarding, as well as interesting. You'll learn different strategies for those very real world. . Problems that people are bringing from their own workplaces and experience. So I think those are some great tips, and I love the call out to user groups as well.

We have so many.

[00:10:07] George Salmon: Yeah, I think they're massively undervalued. Yeah, I really think they're a really excellent way to embed yourself in the community. I think it's easy to view, Alteryx is something that's purely online, but it's not. These are real people and they come together. Amazing things happen.

[00:10:22] Megan Bowers: Definitely. So we'll link that in in the show notes, our user group page. And I do wanna call out too, if there isn't a user group nearby you, there are ones that do meet virtually as well as there's opportunities always to start up a new user group in your area. So I'll definitely link those resources for people that are interested in that.

But I do think, yeah, the in-person community can be . Really valuable along that journey as well. So thanks for all those tips. Shifting gears a bit, I am curious to hear, as a still relatively new user, what do you enjoy about the Alteryx platform?

[00:11:01] George Salmon: Wow. Yeah. I personally think Alteryx is the best software you can use if you're handling data.

I think the best place to start is within each tool there's an input and an output. You can have 10 tools and you can look at the input and output of each tool individually after you've run a a workflow. You can really see what's going on within each tool. That's hands down my favorite feature. It makes debugging really easy and also it's just really cool.

I think that's also important that you find this interesting. You find it cool, and I really think it is, I suppose the speed at which you can put together a workflow. Solve a problem that's really, just look at the Grand Prix, for example, that you hold it, inspire the speed of some of these people. Is is really remarkable.

I suppose the community in general when compared to maybe other software communities is a lot more engaged. The people seem a lot friendlier, but there really are no stupid questions. We're all just here to learn as much as possible.

[00:11:58] Megan Bowers: I enjoy that about our community. Not gonna name names, but some other ones out there.

They will shame you for asking a question. And there's no shame. There's no shame on our community, which I really appreciate For sure. What makes it a lot more welcoming to new people? And another thing I'm wondering, for your journey doing this in 23 days, is there, if you could go back, is there anything you would approach differently?

Anything you would change?

[00:12:26] George Salmon: I think the biggest thing I'd change, I didn't ask a single community question out of fear of seeming silly. As I've come to understand the community more, I've realized that's a really silly way to think about it. Interestingly, the way it's structured is if someone answers a question, they get a solution that then adds to their sort of score.

So even if you're asking silly questions. You're giving an opportunity for someone to come and answer to gain, score, and reputation, and it also means that in the future if someone has a similar question, they can just Google it. And they'll find the answer to your original question and you're just building this huge base of information and knowledge.

That's something I'd definitely change. I'd perhaps also modify the way I went about practicing for the exam specifically. I think I'd do more. Less memorizing and more getting familiar with the design platform, with the community page, with the tools, the tool information. 'cause it is open book. You don't really need to worry about memorizing every little detail.

You're not expected to know that. And I think maybe I put too much pressure on myself to memorize things that no one needs to memorize.

[00:13:37] Megan Bowers: Yeah, I could see that coming straight from like an advanced degree program that's maybe ingrained and a different background than someone coming in who maybe hasn't been in school for 10, 20 years even.

It can be a very different mindset to go like, oh my gosh, I'm taking a test. So it's nice that it's open book for sure. And that. Not too much memorization is required.

[00:14:03] The Value of Alteryx Certifications

[00:14:03] Megan Bowers: I'm curious, like for, for you and your company, what was the motivation for getting certified, or what value do you see in having these certifications?

[00:14:14] George Salmon: Yeah, so I think the certifications are are excellent. Benchmark, it says you're at least this good. And the advanced certification means you're at least pretty, you're good enough at Alteryx, where you could teach other people, where you could build complex workflows. You could use complex things like iterative macros, which for me have come up more than.

That more than most things. I like to stick them in places where they maybe don't belong. And I, yeah, I think overall these certifications says we are at least this good o Of course, we're much better than I would say the average person who has an advanced certification, but they're an excellent benchmark, and I'll personally be working towards the expert certification, hopefully taking that when it releases.

I'll certainly be going for that. There's also maybe a gamified element of it where you wanna have these things 'cause it's another badge on the community and you're leveling up constantly. 'cause I recently reached level 10, I think it's a fireball on the Alteryx community. And yeah, that was a really rewarding feeling.

[00:15:14] Megan Bowers: That's really awesome. Congrats on reaching that already for sure. We've talked about your process for working towards these exams, your approach, why exams, why the certifications are important. Could you tell us a little bit about a project you're working on to create some content? Around, um, was it apps and macro rings?

[00:15:37] George Salmon: Yeah, absolutely. So I'll be building some YouTube videos. It'll be a 21 part. They'll all be very short, but it'll be a 21 part series going through apps, macros, and there'll be some spatial stuff in there as well. I don't want it to be formatted as a sort of university course. I want it to be very much

Uh, guided learning where most of the things that you're doing aren't watching the videos, it's going out, trying challenges, using the tools, getting to grips with everything, and that should be released around the 6th of February. Really excited for those. Yeah, I had a lot of fun thinking about what to put in them and making them, and hopefully they'll be maybe more digestible than other forms of learning.

[00:16:20] Megan Bowers: Yeah, totally. That'll be great to have some bite-sized content kind of around that on YouTube, and we can definitely link those in the show notes as well for listeners to check out. I'm curious what your encouragement would be for new users who are maybe intimidated by the tests. How would you encourage them on that journey?

[00:16:40] George Salmon: Yeah, I think it certainly can be intimidating, especially for someone who has never used a programming language or never really worked with data in the same way. I think the important thing to remember, as we touched on before, is you don't need to memorize. Everything. I like to think of it like learning to drive where you're not gonna learn everything about cars and everything about road laws before you have your first lesson.

You sort of have faith that the more you drive, the more familiar you get with the car, you'll naturally just get better at driving and that's what happens. And it's the same with Alteryx. It's all about building familiarity with the designer desktop, with the community, with the . With the tool sort of documentation.

And I think that's what the test really accurately tests for is your familiarity and not your memory. You don't need to memorize everything. You don't need to draw the interface of a certain tool from memory. It's asking you things which you could easily access if you familiar enough with designer and all the documentation.

So I'd say, yeah, the biggest piece of advice is get familiar with it, use it more and more, and eventually you'll be an advanced level.

[00:17:48] Megan Bowers: That's great.

[00:17:49] Current Projects and Future Goals

[00:17:49] Megan Bowers: So I think a nice place to end would be just to hear a little bit about, now that you're at Boolean, now that you're upskilled with Alteryx, how are you using Alteryx in your day-to-day work and what kind of challenges are you tackling

[00:18:03] George Salmon: At the moment, I'm working on some data visualization things and data in a really wide variety of.

States ranging from poor to awful. So the moment I'm using Alteryx as a tool to clean data up before implementing it in data visualization. I haven't yet been tasked with an Alteryx only project, but hopefully soon in the future I'll get an opportunity to do that. For now, I'm spending quite a lot of time preparing for when the predictive master and the expert exams get released.

I'm definitely gonna have a go at those. There is a really interesting, especially the predictive set of tools, fascinating. I managed to put an optimization tool in a batch macro and have it work first time recently, which is very cool. Probably my best achievement so far. Yeah, I'm really enjoying Alteryx.

If you can't think of how to do something in Alteryx, you don't know enough about Alteryx. That's what I like to say. And I think the, the Python and the R tools within Alteryx fill any functionality that might be missing. We recently had a case where someone was trying to, I. Export data from Azure and within Native Alteryx, there's not a simple way of doing that.

So we wrote a Python script and then we were able to import the data from the Python script into the Alteryx workflow and then deal with it from there, which was really fun. Blending these different ways of manipulating data, a bit of Python, uh, some Azure database stuff, and then Alteryx all blended together really nicely.

[00:19:34] Megan Bowers: I do love that designer can be thought . Swiss army knife where you can really tackle any sort of problem. It can be really satisfying to figure it out, figure those pieces out and pull data from anywhere as well as prepare it for visualization. That's a really common use case and one people can probably relate to.

When you mentioned that. If the data comes in from poor to terrible, basically , I thought you were gonna say from poor to Okay.

[00:20:02] George Salmon: I have not come across Okay. Data just yet. I'm sure I will eventually.

[00:20:06] Megan Bowers: Oh man. A tough start, but pretty common. So I guess it's not surprising, but yeah. That's great that you're finding value and in Alteryx and excited to expand into

Different advanced tool sets, like predictive and stuff like that.

[00:20:22] Conclusion and Encouragement

[00:20:22] Megan Bowers: So it was really cool to, to have you on to hear about your journey and just about everything that you've accomplished in a short period of time will definitely be linking like resources that you mentioned in the show notes for anyone listening who.

Wants to embark on a similar upskilling journey or just get more value out of our community. Everything you mentioned I think is free, and so that's like another huge thing for everyone listening.

[00:20:50] George Salmon: Yeah. Having all of the interactive lessons be free for everyone is a really excellent move. Really doesn't matter who you are.

I think that you could, almost anyone can get the advanced certified certification. I really do think it's open to almost anyone

[00:21:03] Megan Bowers: it is, and I think that's a great place to end and a great encouragement for listeners to go ahead and go try for it. So thanks again, George, for joining and for sharing about your journey.

[00:21:13] George Salmon: Thank you.

[00:21:15] Megan Bowers: Thanks for listening to learn more about resources mentioned in this episode and connect with George. Head over to our show notes on alteryx.com/podcast. And if you like this episode, leave us a review. See you next time.

Ep 197 Zero to Advanced Certified in 23 days [00:00:00] Introduction and Event Announcement [00:00:00] Megan Bowers: Hey, Alter Everything. Listeners, we wanted to let you know that you can join fellow data lovers, analysts and innovators at the Alteryx Inspire 2025 conference. It's the analytics event of the year, happening May 12th through the 15th in Las Vegas. Head over to alteryx.com/inspire to register now. We would love to see you there. [00:00:25] Meet George Salmon: From New User to Advanced Certified [00:00:25] Megan Bowers: Welcome to Alter Everything, a podcast about data science and analytics culture. I'm Megan Bowers, and today I am talking with George Salmon, a data consultant at Bulien. In this episode, we chat about how he went from a new Alteryx user to advanced certified in just 23 days, and his tips for anyone looking to upskill and get certified. Let's get started. George, it's awesome to have you on our podcast today. Thanks for joining. Could you give a quick introduction to yourself for our listeners? [00:00:58] George's Educational Background and Transition to Data Analytics [00:00:58] George Salmon: Absolutely. So I'm George Salmon. I finished university very recently. I did an MSC in Financial and Computational Maths and before that, uh, degree in physics. I've always been more on the sort of math side of things, and recently I started a job with Boolean who are. A small sort of data consultancy in Northeast England, and that's where I started using Alteryx. [00:01:20] Megan Bowers: Awesome. I'd love to start off with hearing a little bit more about your background and your degree in computational math. How do you find that applicable in this transition into data analytics at Bulien? [00:01:33] George Salmon: It is definitely been helpful. It's not directly related to Alteryx really. There was nothing really data, but there certainly was some predictive stuff. So the predictive tool set maybe, but the way I view it is the fundamentally the same sort of problems where you have point A, you have point B, that you're given sort of set of tools and you have to Make that process. And you know, when I was doing maths, it was calculus and algebra, but now in Alteryx it's a select tool, the formula tool. But you know, I like to see them as fundamentally the same sort of problems. [00:02:04] Megan Bowers: Definitely. And a lot of that same kind of problem solving skillset, would you say? [00:02:10] George Salmon: Yeah, I think it's a certain way of thinking about things and it's something that you definitely get better at the more you do. So I definitely say it's helped quite a lot. So I'm fortunate to be in a role where I get to use it almost every day. It, I really love doing it. [00:02:24] Megan Bowers: That's awesome. [00:02:25] Journey to Advanced Certification in 23 Days [00:02:25] Megan Bowers: One of the main reasons I wanted to have you on our show was you went from really not knowing anything about Alteryx when you started your job to getting advanced certified in just 20 days. So can you just walk us through that journey and what that was like for you? [00:02:43] George Salmon: Yeah, that's an interesting story. I do have a caveat though, after I made the community post, I did have a look. My account, I assume was made on the Monday when I started, but it was actually made on the Friday before. So if you're being very technical about it, it is 23 days. [00:02:59] Megan Bowers: Okay. Oh wow. 23 days. That's so much longer. Just ample time to get advanced certified. [00:03:05] George Salmon: Yeah, and it was a really great journey. [00:03:07] Learning Strategies and Resources [00:03:07] George Salmon: I think I started off with the Getting Started Learning path, which is a really fantastic resource for people who have no idea what they're doing. I would definitely say that the first two chapters especially, and what I did is I started off by watching all those videos, and then I did all of the Foundation Weekly Challenges. I think there's about 11 of them. After that, I took the test. Passed first time, which was, I was really happy with. I wasn't sure what to expect. [00:03:30] Megan Bowers: The test for the core. [00:03:32] George Salmon: Oh, the foundation or the foundation. [00:03:35] Megan Bowers: Oh yeah. Yeah. [00:03:36] George Salmon: And I wasn't actually expecting to pass it. First time. I thought it would be very difficult, but it is. It's a really nice way of guiding you in. But then I moved over to Core where I took a slightly different approach instead of watching all the videos back to back, which was, I think, doable for foundation. 'cause there's not too much content for Core. I took a different approach where sort of. Did a video learn about tool and then implemented what I'd learned in a weekly challenge or something like that. So after I finished that, I ended up doing a 38 core weekly challenges, which. I think is excessive, especially if your only goal is core certification. 38 is a bit overkill, but I think for me it was a really good thing to get the fundamentals down. Since I knew I was gonna be going to advanced, I wanted to be really comfortable with the core suite of tools. And then I, yeah, I took the core certification exam, I passed that. I was really happy with myself 'cause I did it very quickly as well. I think it was 10 days or something like that. [00:04:31] Challenges and Triumphs in Certification [00:04:31] George Salmon: But then when I moved to the advanced, interestingly the . Website was undergoing some rebuilding or maintenance or something, so the learning paths weren't working at the time, which when it happened, I was like, oh God, how could this happen to me? It's so terrible. I look back on it now. I think it was a really good thing overall. It forced me into a completely new way of learning, which I think is the main reason why I managed to pass so quickly and in instead of just watching a video and then implementing it, I would throw myself at a challenge. Really not knowing what to expect. Failing a lot of trial and error, a lot of feeling really silly, browsing the community for solutions. But I think that was a really good way of learning. 'cause it forced me to stop and think every time I was doing something right, I got Google this, do I remember how to do that? And that really made things stick in my brain. Decided to change my frame of mind when I was doing the challenges away from, this is something I've gotta do 'cause I've gotta get advanced certified 'cause of this job, which is a very, it's not, there's not much in it for me in that frame of reference. So I, I started viewing each challenge as like a new potential. Almost like a mini hero's journey from a story. Whereas you go in, you dunno what to expect, you learn a load of new things, you fail over and over again, and at the end you, you come out and you learn something new. It was really enjoyable. Then when I took the exam on a Wednesday, I think it was, I ended up going 87%. So I was really happy with that. [00:06:00] Megan Bowers: That's really incredible. I mean, that's a really fast paced, upskilling and learning right there for sure. I. I like that perspective of viewing it as, what did you say? Like a hero's journey, [00:06:11] George Salmon: Almost like a mini hero's journey. Yeah. [00:06:13] Megan Bowers: Yeah. It makes it a little more fun and I know we have badges as you do more and more weekly challenges, so you're hiking the digital mountains part of, part of that journey and part of those little rewards and little fun things along the way. But I think that's, that's really cool and huge encouragement to . To people looking to get their Alteryx certifications, to really look into those learning paths as well as the weekly challenges and, and really diving in, like you said, I've heard that from other Alteryx users too, like sometimes the best way. To learn is to just go try it, learn by doing. You can't know what you don't know till you like get to a problem. So I think that's great advice as well. [00:06:57] Tips for New Alteryx Users [00:06:57] Megan Bowers: Were there any other like resources or strategies that you found valuable when you were preparing? When we chatted earlier, you mentioned using some more advanced techniques, even if it wasn't required. [00:07:10] George Salmon: Absolutely. I guess the first place to start there would be interactive learning paths. They can be great. They certainly have their place. For me, the weekly challenges were far and away the best way of getting to grips with the designer. I think one thing that's maybe overlooked is I. As a skill is learning how to troubleshoot your issues. That's something I think is really important, especially for the exam. It's open book, so you're allowed to have a look at community, have a look at the tool information, and learning how to navigate that quickly is definitely something I'd recommend. In terms of using things where they're not necessarily required? Absolutely. Macros and apps, they are a really cool tool that you can use, but they're not necessarily used very often and when you're studying for the advanced certified exam, they're not gonna come up frequently enough for you to be at a high enough level quickly. And so what I would do is implement macros and apps. In places where they're not required. 'cause a a, as you said earlier, the only way to really improve, or the, in my view, the best way to improve is by doing so. The more you use them, the better you get. And that also goes for regex. There's a great website as a resource that Regex 1 0 1 lets you test your regex code. And for me, every time I came across. A situation where I just use a text of columns, I'd immediately ditched the text of columns, put the RegX tool in instead. If it took me five minutes longer, that will pay dividends in the future. Nice. Um, and then moving from that, this is more recently after I passed the exam, but. I think it's probably just as applicable before you take the exam is doing solutions on the community. You get some really interesting problems there and it's super rewarding when someone accepts your solution. There's a great feeling. Another thing would be user groups. I know they're not available everywhere, but I've been to the Northeast user group. Great place to meet people who are similarly minded. You can ask. These people questions, they're can have loads of experience that you can, that you can look at and you can use. And of course, working at Boolean, which is the company I'm with, they, they've got three ACEs I think. So being around a group of people like that has definitely helped me on my journey. That's super valuable. Obviously not everyone is gonna have access to a team of three ACEs, but I think the community is definitely a, a good surrogate for that. [00:09:27] Megan Bowers: If anyone can go on the community and post a question and have access to not just three, but many ACEs, top contributors, experts, and I love that our community is so responsive, and I totally agree. Like you said, going in and taking that next step to actually try to solve questions is huge. It's rewarding, as well as interesting. You'll learn different strategies for those very real world. . Problems that people are bringing from their own workplaces and experience. So I think those are some great tips, and I love the call out to user groups as well. We have so many. [00:10:07] George Salmon: Yeah, I think they're massively undervalued. Yeah, I really think they're a really excellent way to embed yourself in the community. I think it's easy to view, Alteryx is something that's purely online, but it's not. These are real people and they come together. Amazing things happen. [00:10:22] Megan Bowers: Definitely. So we'll link that in in the show notes, our user group page. And I do wanna call out too, if there isn't a user group nearby you, there are ones that do meet virtually as well as there's opportunities always to start up a new user group in your area. So I'll definitely link those resources for people that are interested in that. But I do think, yeah, the in-person community can be . Really valuable along that journey as well. So thanks for all those tips. Shifting gears a bit, I am curious to hear, as a still relatively new user, what do you enjoy about the Alteryx platform? [00:11:01] George Salmon: Wow. Yeah. I personally think Alteryx is the best software you can use if you're handling data. I think the best place to start is within each tool there's an input and an output. You can have 10 tools and you can look at the input and output of each tool individually after you've run a a workflow. You can really see what's going on within each tool. That's hands down my favorite feature. It makes debugging really easy and also it's just really cool. I think that's also important that you find this interesting. You find it cool, and I really think it is, I suppose the speed at which you can put together a workflow. Solve a problem that's really, just look at the Grand Prix, for example, that you hold it, inspire the speed of some of these people. Is is really remarkable. I suppose the community in general when compared to maybe other software communities is a lot more engaged. The people seem a lot friendlier, but there really are no stupid questions. We're all just here to learn as much as possible. [00:11:58] Megan Bowers: I enjoy that about our community. Not gonna name names, but some other ones out there. They will shame you for asking a question. And there's no shame. There's no shame on our community, which I really appreciate For sure. What makes it a lot more welcoming to new people? And another thing I'm wondering, for your journey doing this in 23 days, is there, if you could go back, is there anything you would approach differently? Anything you would change? [00:12:26] George Salmon: I think the biggest thing I'd change, I didn't ask a single community question out of fear of seeming silly. As I've come to understand the community more, I've realized that's a really silly way to think about it. Interestingly, the way it's structured is if someone answers a question, they get a solution that then adds to their sort of score. So even if you're asking silly questions. You're giving an opportunity for someone to come and answer to gain, score, and reputation, and it also means that in the future if someone has a similar question, they can just Google it. And they'll find the answer to your original question and you're just building this huge base of information and knowledge. That's something I'd definitely change. I'd perhaps also modify the way I went about practicing for the exam specifically. I think I'd do more. Less memorizing and more getting familiar with the design platform, with the community page, with the tools, the tool information. 'cause it is open book. You don't really need to worry about memorizing every little detail. You're not expected to know that. And I think maybe I put too much pressure on myself to memorize things that no one needs to memorize. [00:13:37] Megan Bowers: Yeah, I could see that coming straight from like an advanced degree program that's maybe ingrained and a different background than someone coming in who maybe hasn't been in school for 10, 20 years even. It can be a very different mindset to go like, oh my gosh, I'm taking a test. So it's nice that it's open book for sure. And that. Not too much memorization is required. [00:14:03] The Value of Alteryx Certifications [00:14:03] Megan Bowers: I'm curious, like for, for you and your company, what was the motivation for getting certified, or what value do you see in having these certifications? [00:14:14] George Salmon: Yeah, so I think the certifications are are excellent. Benchmark, it says you're at least this good. And the advanced certification means you're at least pretty, you're good enough at Alteryx, where you could teach other people, where you could build complex workflows. You could use complex things like iterative macros, which for me have come up more than. That more than most things. I like to stick them in places where they maybe don't belong. And I, yeah, I think overall these certifications says we are at least this good o Of course, we're much better than I would say the average person who has an advanced certification, but they're an excellent benchmark, and I'll personally be working towards the expert certification, hopefully taking that when it releases. I'll certainly be going for that. There's also maybe a gamified element of it where you wanna have these things 'cause it's another badge on the community and you're leveling up constantly. 'cause I recently reached level 10, I think it's a fireball on the Alteryx community. And yeah, that was a really rewarding feeling. [00:15:14] Megan Bowers: That's really awesome. Congrats on reaching that already for sure. We've talked about your process for working towards these exams, your approach, why exams, why the certifications are important. Could you tell us a little bit about a project you're working on to create some content? Around, um, was it apps and macro rings? [00:15:37] George Salmon: Yeah, absolutely. So I'll be building some YouTube videos. It'll be a 21 part. They'll all be very short, but it'll be a 21 part series going through apps, macros, and there'll be some spatial stuff in there as well. I don't want it to be formatted as a sort of university course. I want it to be very much Uh, guided learning where most of the things that you're doing aren't watching the videos, it's going out, trying challenges, using the tools, getting to grips with everything, and that should be released around the 6th of February. Really excited for those. Yeah, I had a lot of fun thinking about what to put in them and making them, and hopefully they'll be maybe more digestible than other forms of learning. [00:16:20] Megan Bowers: Yeah, totally. That'll be great to have some bite-sized content kind of around that on YouTube, and we can definitely link those in the show notes as well for listeners to check out. I'm curious what your encouragement would be for new users who are maybe intimidated by the tests. How would you encourage them on that journey? [00:16:40] George Salmon: Yeah, I think it certainly can be intimidating, especially for someone who has never used a programming language or never really worked with data in the same way. I think the important thing to remember, as we touched on before, is you don't need to memorize. Everything. I like to think of it like learning to drive where you're not gonna learn everything about cars and everything about road laws before you have your first lesson. You sort of have faith that the more you drive, the more familiar you get with the car, you'll naturally just get better at driving and that's what happens. And it's the same with Alteryx. It's all about building familiarity with the designer desktop, with the community, with the . With the tool sort of documentation. And I think that's what the test really accurately tests for is your familiarity and not your memory. You don't need to memorize everything. You don't need to draw the interface of a certain tool from memory. It's asking you things which you could easily access if you familiar enough with designer and all the documentation. So I'd say, yeah, the biggest piece of advice is get familiar with it, use it more and more, and eventually you'll be an advanced level. [00:17:48] Megan Bowers: That's great. [00:17:49] Current Projects and Future Goals [00:17:49] Megan Bowers: So I think a nice place to end would be just to hear a little bit about, now that you're at Boolean, now that you're upskilled with Alteryx, how are you using Alteryx in your day-to-day work and what kind of challenges are you tackling [00:18:03] George Salmon: At the moment, I'm working on some data visualization things and data in a really wide variety of. States ranging from poor to awful. So the moment I'm using Alteryx as a tool to clean data up before implementing it in data visualization. I haven't yet been tasked with an Alteryx only project, but hopefully soon in the future I'll get an opportunity to do that. For now, I'm spending quite a lot of time preparing for when the predictive master and the expert exams get released. I'm definitely gonna have a go at those. There is a really interesting, especially the predictive set of tools, fascinating. I managed to put an optimization tool in a batch macro and have it work first time recently, which is very cool. Probably my best achievement so far. Yeah, I'm really enjoying Alteryx. If you can't think of how to do something in Alteryx, you don't know enough about Alteryx. That's what I like to say. And I think the, the Python and the R tools within Alteryx fill any functionality that might be missing. We recently had a case where someone was trying to, I. Export data from Azure and within Native Alteryx, there's not a simple way of doing that. So we wrote a Python script and then we were able to import the data from the Python script into the Alteryx workflow and then deal with it from there, which was really fun. Blending these different ways of manipulating data, a bit of Python, uh, some Azure database stuff, and then Alteryx all blended together really nicely. [00:19:34] Megan Bowers: I do love that designer can be thought . Swiss army knife where you can really tackle any sort of problem. It can be really satisfying to figure it out, figure those pieces out and pull data from anywhere as well as prepare it for visualization. That's a really common use case and one people can probably relate to. When you mentioned that. If the data comes in from poor to terrible, basically , I thought you were gonna say from poor to Okay. [00:20:02] George Salmon: I have not come across Okay. Data just yet. I'm sure I will eventually. [00:20:06] Megan Bowers: Oh man. A tough start, but pretty common. So I guess it's not surprising, but yeah. That's great that you're finding value and in Alteryx and excited to expand into Different advanced tool sets, like predictive and stuff like that. [00:20:22] Conclusion and Encouragement [00:20:22] Megan Bowers: So it was really cool to, to have you on to hear about your journey and just about everything that you've accomplished in a short period of time will definitely be linking like resources that you mentioned in the show notes for anyone listening who. Wants to embark on a similar upskilling journey or just get more value out of our community. Everything you mentioned I think is free, and so that's like another huge thing for everyone listening. [00:20:50] George Salmon: Yeah. Having all of the interactive lessons be free for everyone is a really excellent move. Really doesn't matter who you are. I think that you could, almost anyone can get the advanced certified certification. I really do think it's open to almost anyone [00:21:03] Megan Bowers: it is, and I think that's a great place to end and a great encouragement for listeners to go ahead and go try for it. So thanks again, George, for joining and for sharing about your journey. [00:21:13] George Salmon: Thank you. [00:21:15] Megan Bowers: Thanks for listening to learn more about resources mentioned in this episode and connect with George. Head over to our show notes on alteryx.com/podcast. And if you like this episode, leave us a review. See you next time.

This episode was produced by Megan Bowers (@MeganBowers), Mike Cusic (@mikecusic), and Matt Rotundo (@AlteryxMatt). Special thanks to @andyuttley for the theme music track, and @mikecusic for our album artwork.

Alter Everything Podcast

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179: Zero to Advanced Certified in 23 days

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This episode was produced by Megan Bowers (@MeganBowers), Mike Cusic (@mikecusic), and Matt Rotundo (@AlteryxMatt). Special thanks to @andyuttley for the theme music track, and @mikecusic for our album artwork.