Get a JOB w/ Google Data Analytics Certificate?!? (ft. Certificate Holders)

google has severely disrupted the data science education industry with the release of the google data analytics certificate hosted by corcera google along with 130 other employers in their consortium are stating that they will be accepting this certificate as an equivalent for a four-year degree for entry-level data analyst roles as the number of job opportunities continue to rise in data analytics combined with extremely competitive salaries it makes one beg the question if the certificate is too good to be true what up dead nerds i'm luke data analyst and my channel is all about tech and skills for data science and i recently did a video about the google data analytics certificate hosted by gersera and i received a lot of questions from you all asking about the usefulness of this certificate in order to better answer your questions i recently spoke with four graduates of the google data analytics certificate to better understand what their experience was like going through the program and i'm sharing a lot of those key takeaways with you today for the questions themselves i focused on four main topic areas so specifically one what were your overall thoughts on the course itself two what are your plans for succeeding now that you have the certificate three what is the job search and market like and then four will the certificate alone get you a job as a disclaimer this video is not sponsored and neither google nor coursera had any say in the contents of this video for the interviews themselves however coursera was gracious enough to put me in contact with three of the four graduates that i spoke with first up is anant and he is a professional filmmaker based out of india during the pandemic his cell phone business took a major hit and now he's looking to transition into data science he's hoping to combine his industry knowledge with his newfound data analytical skills to land him his job of a marketing data insights analyst next up is paul paul is originally from lebanon and is finishing up his degree in transportation engineering he has just begun his job search and so he's looking for opportunities that combine both his engineering degree and his passion for data science then there's antonio and antonio recently graduated with a business degree with a specialization in management interesting enough a few days before our interview he had actually just started his first job as a quality assurance data analyst for a popular web services company additionally i talked to my own contact which was wale from the youtube channel the work life man which i'll include a link for above and wale is a full-time data analyst and he took the certificate in order to have a better understanding of what the certificate offerings were and to better inform his subscribers now that we have a better understanding of everybody let's actually dive into the questions the first one we're going to focus on is actually understanding what was everybody's overall thoughts on the general course contents that were provided to them so let's start with paul who provided a great overview of the course certificate kind of is targeted towards beginners so i would say like the first three courses of the certificate are very basic if you have like zero knowledge because they take it very slowly there's eight courses in the certificate and it's not up until like uh fourth course that you start learning like the hard stuff like sequel tableau and r with that i get a lot of questions around what experience is needed for the course and as paul demonstrated here no experience is necessary and it will ramp up as you go along in the course additionally i thought anant shared an interesting aspect of the course as well the best part about this course it's not the technical skills that they teach you because that can be learned from any place but this course really concentrated a lot on the soft skills or more if i say so the culture of uh the data world how the job is you know what do you actually need to do in the job so that is where that course really stood out for me that it made me realize what i want to do in data analysis one aspect that i didn't really consider when making my first video on this course was that it's maybe actually a good opportunity for those that have a degree that is non-data analytical based and i think this is a good insight that paul shared that's the thing that's the thing because in my major for example we only learn like matlab there's a huge focus on matlab but now there's tools like python and r and like data analysis tools like tableau and whatnot and you don't you don't really get like but you don't get the chance to learn these tools in school now we also went into some not so great aspects of the course itself and antonio shared a pretty great insight of how the course focused a lot or maybe too much on spreadsheets and i do think in the beginning it focuses too much on like excel and like what is data analysis like like yeah excel is important to know but that isn't what you're going to use probably on a day-to-day you know analog everything like really the big thing that i've seen like a lot of jobs ask for is like you know a sequel another big concern that i saw not only these interviews but from the question i receive is the choice of programming language a lot of people aren't satisfied with the choice of r for a programming language instead of using python i i i mean i guess it could be good to know but most places you know want python and stuff like that so maybe if we get enough comments from the community on this we can actually get google to revise the course in the future to have python instead of r i will note however that i actually started my data science journey with learning r and then i switched over to python so i really don't think it's that bad of a problem that you can't overcome and switch to python it's just more of an inconvenience but overall from question everybody it seemed like everybody agreed that the certificate itself was worth the cost and effort it it pays for itself in the end you like yeah i i can tell you that's for sure you can make that in a in a single day if you get a job and what you want to do so let's wrap this section up by discussing who this certificate is not really aimed for and that is those that have that work experience in data analytics if you have three years experience as a data analyst then most of what is being taught on the course are things that you already know right right and it probably won't make so much of a difference okay so now let's get into the second section we're going to focus on here is what is everybody's plans for succeeding in their job search now that they have this certificate let's start with antonio the business major that recently landed his job as a data analyst on what his strategy was i thought it would be good to have on a resume because i don't have you know a computer science degree or something like that you know like oh i could do like a data science or data analytics job so i thought it'd be good to put on a resume i also asked antonio if he thought the certificate alone got him his job and although he said it did help he pointed to some other reasons why he also landed his job i wouldn't say it was specifically the certificate i did have like i did like related internships that did kind of some similar stuff or like had some component of like sql or r or something like that related to it so i think antonio makes an excellent example for others to follow and that you need to show some sort of experience of your data analytical skills so antonio has this internship and i went to what others had so for anant himself he's showcasing his experience through his portfolio currently i've been building a portfolio so i have like four or five projects right now and the portfolio projects that anant is working on or tied to his past experiences and his passions when i show it to a potential recruiter or anyone they should know what i am about for the case of paul he is trying to differentiate himself from his engineering classmates in order to stand out with his newly found data analytical skills combined transportation engineering as well as data science it's not really common for a civil engineer to also have data science skills so i feel it's it's a good path on brazilian i think so as well so now let's move into the third section and understanding what is the job market and the job search like trying to use the certificate and your skills in order to land a job so let's start with antonio to understand what process he took to land his job if you use the job resources provided by coursera and google or if you use the zone i found this job on linkedin i think that linkedin is a great source for job that's personally where i've i looked the entire time because they have an abundance of jobs and it is updated quite frequently so i would go on there daily and apply to like 10 or 15 jobs every day that's how i would like to hear back antonio did point out one humbling part of the job search process that i think we all need to realize not to get discouraged because it can be very easy to get discouraged you know i applied a 150 plus jobs probably before i got his job and it wasn't a quick interview process either it you know it took about a month to get the job but what about those that are currently looking for a job let's go with paul first to see how he's using his certificate combined with linkedin to potentially find a job as soon as i posted the certificate on my linkedin profile i felt that i started getting much more exposure to the company and i've been contacted by a few employers and i'm getting really positive feedback on my data data analysis skills so i really feel it does contribute to me finding a job hopefully although paul is from lebanon he's focusing his job search for the us let's take a look at other regions of the world and we'll first start with india first of all the thing is that india is very competitive especially if you have a background which is not a core information technology not variety most of the jobs which i come across uh either they will mention that you need uh electronics or you need computers or you need iit's i'm like okay and then even if the job mentions pressures there will be a factor two plus years of experience and what about even other regions of the world such as africa so it's it's kind of i think it's positive um it's not as high as um you would find in the u.s or in europe right um i think nigeria and nigeria and i think in africa at large we're just coming to terms with using data to make decisions finally let's get into the last section of understanding the certificate itself of will it alone land you a job as a data analyst because there seems to be a lot of questions and concerns around this from the discussions that i had with everybody it seemed that everybody was focusing their efforts on using linkedin as the primary resource to find jobs and not necessarily using the resources from coursera and google and their consortium of employers i did talk with antonio about his thoughts on the coursera job portal and how the contents of it has shifted over his job search over the past few months they had some more like data analytics jobs available than when i was looking at it though it's not like a crazy huge amount honestly like it isn't like oh here's a bunch of jobs set aside for if you finish this certificate he also did mention that the majority of jobs were looking for people with work experience but there were some available that were looking for certificate holders this is like for if you did the certificate i think it says i require girl with google analytics certificate but even in this job posting they wanted you to demonstrate some sort of experience via such as a portfolio and i think this answers the question on if this certificate alone will get you a job this isn't going to get you a job anywhere by itself without any without doing more beyond it so how can you use this certificate then to get a job i think paul is an excellent example of this of how he's using his domain knowledge combined with his newly acquired skills in order to be more successful in his job search yeah i felt the need i had to do this by myself yeah and um it's it's working out i feel it's really important because like employers are actually praising me for like this skill like really data analysis skills yeah so let's close this section off by looking at a strategic approach you can take if you're not finding that dream job after acquiring the certificate you know encourage people not to be too close-minded on data analysts data analyst data analyst because you know you might not just get that job you know right here in nigeria i don't know maybe in the u.s it might be different what you want to do is just to grab whatever job you can grab your hands on grab your hands on that job and then learn data analysis you know analysis as you as you take on that job and from there start building up your experience and worth in this field and really what really helped me is the fact that you know if you're if you're on a job you have you have access to data sets right you have access to data sets you have access to domain knowledge those two combinations of domain knowledge and access to data that you understand you know it's going to just it's going to you know give you that um exponential uh you know uh push right right integrated into data analysis of data science oh love me some wildlife make sure you subscribe to his channel i really felt like these interviews answered a lot of my own questions and i hope that they answered questions and concerns that you had about the certificate itself additionally i feel that this helped confirm that those that are new to data analytics and new to this field that this is the best option for you to go out and actually learn the skills that you need for this job i would however adjust your expectations and understand that you're not going to necessarily get a job just because you have the certificate you're going to need to put in the work and actually build up your work experience by demonstrating this in your portfolio as always if you got value out of this video smash that like button and with that i'll see you in the next [Music] [Music] one

Channel: Luke Barousse

Views: 116,814

Rating: 4.9693456 out of 5

Keywords: data viz by luke, business intelligence, data science, bi, computer science, data nerd, google data analytics certificate, google data certificates, data certificates, google certificates, life after certificate, python vs r

Id: BEKXRqqgHCw

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021