Let me share my experience of obtaining Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification in June 2025.
I already have GCP Professional Cloud Architect, AWS Security Specialty, and ISC2 Certified Cloud Security Professional qualifications. I am a Security Architect, so why bother with Security Engineer title? Well, my employer offered me free exam voucher, plus knowing engineering makes me a better Security Architect, so I decided to take on the challenge.
Still, I constantly doubted my decision, and that was the biggest challenge in the exam preparation.
You have a much bigger risk of abandoning certification than failing the exam.
From my previous experience, I know that Google Cloud Skills Boost is the best training resource for GCP exams, so the Security Engineer Learning Path is what I used exclusively. There is also Pluralsight channel with similar content, just a bit older and with fewer modules.
Going though that learning path took a lot of time. 2-4 hours every day for 3 months. That is a big time expenditure. Money-wise cloudskillboost subscription is not expensive.
In my training, I was using the same approach as for the PCA exam – reading documentation with “examiner’s eye” – for every piece of content, I would try to predict what the examiner’s question would be. I would note these down, as well as noting non-intuitive and easy to forget information. For example – the default time period for storing Admin Activity and Data Access Logs.
This training made me a better security professional!
For the practice, I used the official sample questions and the learning path workbook. They will give you a good indication of the exam complexity level, but the exam questions were totally different.
Regarding exam questions I have bad news for you – I don’t think you can theoretically prepare for them. You have to have practical GCP working experience. Looking back at the Cloud Skill Boost learning path materials and the actual exam question – there is not much overlap. For example, there is big chunk of training dedicated to GCP networking, VPC, NAT, Load Balancing, but few question about it in the actual exam. Your experience might be different, though. Your mileage may vary.
Another bad news is that Google has shortened re-certification from 3 to 2 years. I am not looking forward to spending another 3 months on exam prep in 2 years. I have other qualifications to re-certify as well. Certification maintenance becomes a problem for me.
The good news is that you can answer a lot of questions via pure logic, conceptual understanding and actual work experience. Work experience and general security knowledge will serve you best. So maybe for recertification I will just recap my training notes and hope that logic and experience will be enough.
Another good news is that 2 hours is plenty for 50 exam questions. I answered all of them in less than 1 hour.
I took the remote proctoring exam option, and it came with consequences:
- no toilet breaks allowed
- drinks and food are allowed now, but be aware of the point above
- there is a requirement for secondary camera monitoring. I used mobile phone for that and lost 30 minutes troubleshooting Firefox camera/microphone permissions. I could not solve it, but thankfully Chrome on Android worked flawlessly.
For my next exam, I am thinking of getting the test center option. I am not a fan of pre-exam troubleshooting – there is enough stress already. It would be sad to lose exam to a phone or laptop glitch.
For those planning to take the exam, I wish I could give more tips, but here are a few:
- The training is lengthy, but it is useful for professional growth
- Schedule and pay in advance to give yourself a strong incentive
- Use your personal email for registration
- Official training resources and product documentation are plenty enough to prepare.
- Read training resources and documentation in examiner’s shoes – would you make an exam question out of this content?
- Take the test center exam option for less stress and more freedom