Hello, my name is Shouming Jiang and I am a CDA Level I certification holder.

I am currently working in a fintech company doing consulting and solution related work.

My undergraduate degree is in Information and Computing Science, which is almost half math and half computer courses. I had some elementary and systematic training in statistics, databases, and software programming. After that, I studied Management Science and Engineering in graduate school.

After graduation, my first job was in strategic planning in the group strategy department of a public company. Later I followed the career path of consulting planning and solutions.

After working for a few years, I often think about how I can continuously improve my professional ability in the field of consulting, so as to enhance my core competitiveness in the workplace.

I found that besides systematic consulting planning theory and experience, many positions also require good foreign language skills and data analysis skills, such as Python, SQL, SPSS, R, Tableau, big data analysis and other software tools and skills.

It so happened that a friend of mine was studying and preparing for the CDA qualification, so I started to study systematically with this goal in mind after I had a preliminary understanding with her.

- This is how I prepared for the exam
I studied mainly around the exam syllabus, then I collected some online courses of high quality on the Internet and prepared to follow the courses to check the gaps.

At the same time, I took out some of the statistics textbooks I had studied during my undergraduate years and went through them.

Because I studied mainly in my free time apart from my daily work, I prepared for the exam in a longer period of time, a year and a half in total.

I usually asked myself to study at least 3 to 4 days a week, for more than half an hour each time. Occasionally, I would stop studying for a week or two because I was busy at work. But I don't regret it, it's important to keep going.

In the course of preparation, although I have some professional foundation in statistics, but really far from the study time is also relatively long, some of the more complex parts, such as hypothesis testing, regression fitting and other theoretical and practical methods or spent some time to review and understand, but fortunately the final examination involving this part of the knowledge is not difficult to examine.

In terms of test preparation, I think these points should be noted by the students preparing for the exam.
First, the examination syllabus and mock questions must be well read, well done, good knowledge to check the gaps.

Secondly, it is necessary to take notes, especially when studying systematically, when the battle line is long, when you need to fight against forgetfulness, and when you need ammunition for the last few days of concentrated preparation.

In terms of future planning, I will continue to accumulate in my field of expertise and improve my overall ability.