Introduction
Data science and its applications in the real world like Machine Learning and Deep Learning penetrate every walk of our lives. With this, the demand for data science-related jobs has seen a significant uptick in the employment market. This has spawned the business of online education and certification in data science and related subjects. Certifications are a way to prove your knowledge and skills to the employer. Also, the employer judges your employability based on your experience, how you have applied the knowledge acquired to solve real-world problems, and how much the business relates to that particular business problem you solved. They do so to gauge if you can overcome the many challenges of real-world problems and your approach to finding solutions to such problems.
There are many institutions today that offer courses, programs with some even leading to industry-recognized certifications. Let’s look at what a data science course should ideally teach you and test you on. Also, how much support or consultation you get during your course from faculty matters. What are the alternatives when faculty is not available? All these are important questions that need to be answered before you commit to any course. This will give you a somewhat fair idea of which course or program could be the best data science certificate course to join.
Best Data Science Certification
So, what should you look for in any data science certification course?
From an absolute beginner’s perspective, here is a bottom-up view of what data science certification should offer you.
The absolute basics
Data Science, as you might get from the name, is a science. It is based on years of research work and proved theories and experiments in mathematics, statistics, computer science, economics, and more. To wrap your head around all the techniques in use in the data science world, you should have the basic aptitude in all the above subjects. This usually is part of your educational learning curve, particularly in the Computer Science domain. If there is a certification course that promises to take you through the basics and build yourself a strong foundation, then in all probability, you have a course that takes you through the organic learning curve and is well designed to make a good data scientist out of you.
The lower to middle-level data skills
To work with data, you need to have certain skills in extracting data and performing various tasks like data munging, data cleansing, visualizations, and analysis. This usually translates to using some popular tools that allow you to extract data from your favorite data store, slice and dice your data, present compelling stories based on impressive and effective visualizations. Tools like Excel, Power BI, Tableau are some of the most popular ones. A typical student would have had good exposure to tools like Excel, but if a course is helping you learn tools like Tableau, Qlik, and the like, you are good to go.
The Data Science foundation in Machine Learning/Deep Learning/Neural Networks
The data science foundation is based on several algorithms around real-world problems modeled in mathematics. Here is where all your skills in mathematics, statistics, and probability come into play. Data Science techniques like Machine Learning and Deep Learning have several algorithms that work on data sets. These data sets and algorithms can be modeled and implemented in programming languages like R, Python, MATLAB, and Scala. This is where you need to have good programming skills to understand and work with data science algorithms.
The cherry on top
Look for well-appointed faculty, industry experts in any online course. The course or program should also be well-curated and designed to allow for an organic learning curve. Usually, shortcuts in the field of data science hardly work.
Conclusion
One good place for a data science online course is Greatlearning. Great learning also offers a master’s program in data science that leads to an online data science certificate.
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