Acing Elastic Certified Engineer Exam

This blog post shares some basic tips and techniques that can be helpful in acing the Elastic Certified Engineer Exam.

First things first

• Check the Exam Version (8.1 at the time of writing this post)
• Note the duration - 3 hours
• Check Exam Topics
• Read the complete FAQ

All of the above can be found at Elastic Certified Engineer Exam page.

Please do not miss to read the FAQ.

Next Steps

• Without missing a beat, go through Rich Raposa's webinar. This is extremely important as it not only gives an overview of what to expect in the exam, but also shows how the exam environment looks like. In essence, it gives some familiarity with the exam environment which is immensely helpful. The webinar is dated July 2021 but it's pretty relevant.

• Read this excellent post by Surbhi Mahajan. It has links to a plethora of resources including mock tests.

• Re-read the Exam Topics. This is extremely important as it's easy to get way-laid during exam preparation when curiosity gets the better of us and start reading and trying out topics that are not on syllabus / agenda. If you have any questions related to the topics, send an email to [e-mail]. The certification folks at Elastic are pretty empathetic and very responsive.

Preparation Strategy

• The exam topics has 5 main sections. The questions will be distributed across them so makes sense to prepare from all the sections.
• From each section, read few topics and gain some confidence. Confidence is the key here. If you find losing your confidence, take up a topic that's more familiar, tackle it, regain confidence and take up challenging / un-familiar topics.
• The exam has around 10 questions with a time duration of 3 hours (180 minutes). So approx 17 minutes per question with a buffer of 10 mins. During the exam, don't spend too much time on one question as it affects confidence. First attempt the questions that seem familiar and then use the remaining time to attempt other questions. There's partial grading so do attempt all the questions.
• Be well-versed with Elastic Documentation. Know how to navigate and find the relevant info. The documentation is fully available to use during the exam so no need to memorise the APIs. Just remember where to look.

Hopefully this helps you in your preparation for the ECE Exam. Good luck!