I passed the Google Generative AI Leader certification yesterday.
What made this one different from the others on my wall wasn’t the subject matter — it was how I prepared for it.
The NotebookLM Experiment
I’ve sat plenty of exams. The usual process: gather the official documentation, work through practice questions, take notes, do lab for product related and repeat. It works, but it’s slow and the information stays flat — you read it, you retain some of it, you forget the rest.
This time I tried something different. I uploaded the study materials and official Google documentation into NotebookLM and used it as an interactive study partner rather than a static reference.
The difference was significant.
What Actually Helped
The most useful feature wasn’t the chat — it was the audio overviews. NotebookLM generates a podcast-style conversation between two AI hosts discussing your uploaded material. It sounds like a gimmick. It isn’t.
Listening to a back-and-forth discussion forces the concepts into a different format than reading. Things I’d skimmed on the page became clearer when I heard them discussed in context. I played several of them during commutes and found myself retaining concepts I’d glossed over in text form.
The Q&A mode was also genuinely useful for exam prep. I’d ask it to quiz me on a specific topic, push back on its answers, and ask it to explain the reasoning behind why a particular answer was right or wrong. That kind of active recall is hard to replicate with static materials.
What to Watch For
NotebookLM works on what you give it. If your sources are incomplete, the answers will be too — and it won’t always tell you that. I caught a few gaps where I knew the official material said something more specific than what it summarised. The tool is only as good as the corpus you build.
It’s also not a replacement for reading the source material at least once. Use it to reinforce and interrogate what you’ve already encountered, not to shortcut the initial learning.
The Broader Point
I’m a network security and reliability engineer by trade. GenAI isn’t my primary domain — I pursued this certification because the technology is increasingly relevant to the infrastructure and security work I do, and I’d rather understand it properly than learn it second-hand.
What I didn’t expect was to come away thinking as much about how I learned as what I learned. The ability to turn a pile of documentation into an interactive study session is genuinely new. It won’t replace rigorous study, but it changes the texture of it.
Useful tool. Recommended for anyone preparing for a knowledge-heavy certification.