Disappointing when I realize it has been two years since I have blogged on WordPress. As a matter of fact, the last time I did it was when I cracked the BW 7.0 associate certification. Without further ado, I invite you to my personal point-of-view on C_HANAIMP131 (SAP HANA 1.0 SP6) exam. I managed to pass the exam on April 29th, 2014.
Why get certified on SAP HANA?
Well this must be a generic question on everyone’s mind and maybe not specific to the SAP HANA world. The cost of the exam is quite towards the higher side. As I know, in North America it would cost about $500 through Pearson Vue, or at least that is what it used to cost when I used to work there. Down here in the Indian sub-continent it would cost about Rs. 39,000. So my point, it is expensive and is a major decision, to take or not. Jotted below are my reasons with descending priority.
Knowledge : This is something that I realized as an outcome of my previous certification. I had appeared for the BW 7.0 exam(C_TBW4570) two years ago, right around the same time. I never realized its value when I prepared ardently for the exam and then managed to pass it. The knowledge I gained preparing for the exam gave me an upper hand until even this day at my job environment. I ever so often run into situations where in I am thrown into a completely new scenario and fortunate for me, with my knowledge acquired from the exam preparation, I usually manage to assess and handle the situation appropriately. SAP certifications are sort of their product manuals, the syllabus touches upon every concept/functionality of that product. If you seriously have to prepare towards clearing the exam, you really do not have room to ignore any topic. This ensures the examinee to know and understand every aspect of the product thence being sure of the quality of the examinee.
Writing two exams two years apart, I feel SAP has improved quite a bit on the quality of the exam. The HANA exam I wrote now had a mix of approximately ~60% direct questions and ~40% scenario based and twisted questions. Unless you know the concept well and have worked on it, getting the twisted ones right would not be easy. The pass percentage was 61% but beware as more consultants get certified and newer service packs get released, the pass percentage goes up. Look it up on the SAP website to know the latest pass percentage(there could be a slight chance that even this may not be up to date).
Confidence : Passing the exam builds a certain level of confidence. This is predominantly vital in today’s ever competent work environment. It is not “the sole” requirement for succeeding at your work-place, of course that requires a lot of experience on each of the scenarios within the product, but it arms you with the confidence that you have a fundamental knowledge around all aspects of that product.
Selling yourself : Of course, let’s all candidly agree that this is the primary reason for most of us sitting the exam. The chance to throw it on your resumes, attaching the logo in your corporate email signature, talking about it during those corporate team meetings or just a strong point during your appraisals. Well, I say it’s a valid and good reason. Flaunt away your accomplishment with all glory! You worked for it, you deserve to boast about it. But, I would have to admit that not all interviewers go by the certificate. All I could say is, if there is a call to be taken between a certified and non-certified consultant who perform quite similarly at their interviews, the certificate gives that extra bit of assurance on the quality of the consultant.
How to prepare for a HANA certification ?
People have different ways to prepare towards an exam and so I have my own. But there are few things common among all and I’d like to call out. Preparing for SAP certification exam is a serious decision to take. It is expensive, requires the examinee to be self-motivated and focused to go through mountains of material. A perfect preparation would be a minimum of 6 months of detailed hands-on on the product followed by a 1 months rigorous study plan for around 5-6 hours a day. This is just my personal take, it could vary depending on the individual. Also, SAP might require specific experience requirements to ensure the quality of the examinee.
Experience on the product HANA : As I mentioned above, this exam has several twisted question. You really need to get yourself very comfortable with the tool and work on some real life scenarios. Just building an attribute or analytic view might not be adequate. Most of the questions come from advanced modeling and there are quite some questions on optimization and performance tuning of models. Unless you modeled, failed and then rectified , these questions would be hard to nail. Actual experience on HANA would help you prepare and memorize all the theory and concepts required for answering the direct questions.
I had quite some experience in building POC scenarios for different customers. I had been working on and off on HANA for the last 1 year or so. I started working on it out of personal motivation, signing up for an AWS m2.xlarge instance. It was expensive for me, but I looked at this way, how much would you pay to have first hand experience on an aggressive product as HANA, pretty much SAP’s game changer(revenue churner or whatever you call it) over the last decade. With that thought, everything felt reasonable. Later on I was given access to my organization’s bare metal demo system.
One thing good about SAP HANA, is that SAP has evolved out of their blackbox approach. The SAP environment was not really available for the masses to learn and explore like other software majors. With HANA, SAP opened the doors and made their product available through various cloud service providers. In fact, SAP does not charge for the HANA instance, you only pay the cloud service provider their respective service charges. For self preparing people out there like me, my advice would be to take a 30 day trial subscription on Cloudshare(entirely free) and then maybe switch to Amazon as it works out a bit cheaper compared to its peers. I don’t vouch for the service providers, it is your call to compare the prices, hardware configs, accessibility, schemes etc. and decide upon the right HANA cloud service provider. Each of them compare to the other differently based on various parameters. Anyways, rather than digressing from the topic, it is worth taking a connection and playing with every scenario scenarios in the exam syllabus as your would have almost all privileges and accesses possibly required.
There are topics that may not be available for learning purposes to the masses. Topics such as backup/recovery, different provisioning methods, BW interactions with HANA, BOBJ interactions with HANA etc. would not be possible to simulate on the developer cloud systems. I fortunately was able to get a basic display level access in my organization for most of these scenarios. If you do not have that privilege, I suggest search around the internet, watch videos, read documents, it would help you mentally imagine the activities on each of these scenarios.
Training : I have never had the opportunity to sit in an SAP’s official trainings and so I am not in a position to judge it. But I believe the quality would be good as it allows you to appear for the exam without really having an experience. If you are thinking of a third-party training, I have negative view-point. There are loads of material, how-tos, guides, YouTube videos on SAP websites. Going through them would help you get a good feel of the product. As SAP has taken an open approach for HANA, you could use Google to almost get to any topic of interest. I am not going to list out the links here, there are several blogs at SDN which already have this organized.
Study Material : I prepared for the exams from the SAP training material HA100, HA300 and HA350. Apart from this I went through a lot of videos , SDN blogs, Teched(now called SAP D-code) contents from 2012 & 2013, ASUG documents etc. While I prepared, I used to go through each topic, try to simulate them in AWS and search videos and blogs on them to get a better understanding of the topic. Fortunately I was given official access to the material through some partnership program my organization had with SAP. If you do not have access to these materials, you still would be able to prepare for the exam by scouring the internet and reading up the topics from various blogs and other media contents. You just would have to painstakingly search for all the content.
General guidelines for preparing towards the exam ?
Before the exam : If you have access to the HA100, HA300 and HA350. You really need to go through them patiently. I went through them three times, had prepared a 60 page summary note which I had additionally gone through couple of times. My dedicated preparation for the exam spanned over a month and a half. Questions could come out of almost anywhere, maybe not even a text in the book, but just from one of the images which you might not have paid attention to. It is imperative to go through them patiently and paying attention to each every line, footnote, tooltip, image, exercise etc.
It took me nearly a month to go through all the books the first time as I patiently took summary notes and simulated all the scenarios. The second revision was done in about a week’s time and the remaining revisions I was able to cramp them in another week just before the exam. Even after all of this, I felt stumped at some questions. There are two types of questions, single right answer and multiple right answers. In case of multiple right answers, there would be a note mentioning the number of right answers(I know, phewww!!
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Even good guy Greg agrees…
Either ways, even the wrong options are too tantalizing. So if you have only a basic understanding of the topic, you would fall right into the trap.
At the exam : You will have 80 questions to answer in 180 minutes. I think this is very reasonable. Especially, if you are from an engineering background, having gone through those Math and Physics exams with heavy calculus problems, this exam should be not much of a hurdle. The time is more than adequate. Never jump the gun. Read a question patiently and read the answer choices patiently. I ran into several questions where the answers where all looking right. The approach I took was to go through each answer choice and try prove it incorrect against the question. Finally the ones that stand the best chances would be the right ones. Basically, take educated guesses. You have a lot of time, so use it! There is an option where you could flag a question and come back at it later. So maybe you could flag all the tough questions and go through them at the end. This would give you that extra bit of confidence that you have answered majority of the questions already.
After the exam : Talk about it, boast about it, flaunt your certificate. Try to educate and motivate others towards the exam!
I happened to notice only just before the exam that the next version has already been released. C_HANAIMP141 based on SP7. It was too late for me to change the exam code and had to stick with C_HANAIMP131.
Comments?; Questions?; Feedback?
If there is something that I could help(within agreeable limits) I’d be glad to assist! Hey! Real value of knowledge is when it is shared.
But,
If you are planning on asking for the material, ask the grumpy cat… He’s the boss!
I despise use of dumps or enquiring questions from those who have already appeared for the exam. You would never walk out of the exam hall satisfied and you also demean the efforts of those got it the hard way. So, if you’re planning on asking me for something of that sought, speak to king Boromir.
Cheers!!!
Prabhu DC's DataWarehouse 