As an IT professional, I have always believed in diversifying my career aspects through learning programs that include online courses & certifications. I have keen interest in data & it’s infinite possibilities in the world which is impacting everyone of us & every job we do. To explore it further, I enrolled for Google Data Analytics: Professional Certificate program offered by Google through Coursera platform. I will share my learning experience in this blog post:
This professional certificate program is based on 8 courses which must be completed in order to earn certificate. It is based in English language. Eight courses are lengthy enough that even if learner takes full time to complete this certificate then it would not be completed in less than 3 months. Each course content is designed on week basis. However, learners can take manage their own schedule and complete the certificate program. There is an option to reset deadline as well. Content consists of videos, articles, quizzes & assignments as part of their content which must be completed to complete any course.
I enrolled in this certificate program last year. However, I took maternity break and resumed it in Jun, 2023. I was able to complete certificate program in Sep, 2023. It took me approximately 6 months with 10 hours/week to complete it. Note that, these details are mentioned in the certification link as well.
Starting with content of this certificate program, it is intended for beginners who are completely new to data and tech tools for data visualization. Hence, it has a lot of theory related to basic data analysis concepts which I believe is really important as foundational learning. Hence, if you are planning and new to this, you can start the program right away.
This certification program has courses related to data visualization and hence, learners are introduced to various tools related to it as well. Learners are introduced to using excel, tableau and R programming for data visualization. Learning this tools can be handy skill for excelling in one’s career. So, these courses open the world to learn these tools and that is the best part of this certificate program.
Since, the objective of program is to help beginners in starting career as junior data analyst so curriculum includes material related to resume building, improving profile & interview skills. It is good that it is part of the course but I feel that material related to these topics are really lengthy & repetitive. I feel that this material could have been replaced with more data related content.
I am tech person and I have been part of data analysis process in my professional work so I felt this program was basic for me apart from Tableau tool & R programming. Because I was coming back from maternity break, I enjoyed learning something new but easy to go. However, if anyone is new to data analysis, one should definitely take this certificate program and hopefully, it would open new doors of great possibilities. In addition to that, Google keeps updating content of the certificate program so one would always be learning from up to date content.
If you have any questions about this certificate program, drop your questions in comments below. I would be happy to answer. Happy learning 🙂
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Saima Karim 