Google Data Analytics Certificate Course 8 of 8 - Capstone Case Study + Full Program Impressions

this is it guys the google data analytics professional certificate program capstone case study we're going to review it right now just kind of analyze stuff what is up ladies and gentlemen matt bratton here with tmbanalytics.com your analytics career headquarters this is it guys this is the final video that i'm doing in this google data analytics professional certificate program full course review playlist and this one is for the capstone this is the capstone project it's a case study and i'm just gonna i'm just gonna go right to it guys let's just jump right in let's get this bad boy going because i've got a lot to say what i intend to do here sort of walk through how they've got the the capstone the case study structured how i kind of worked through it how i would recommend that you guys work through it and then i'm going to just do a brief recap of everything that's gone on in this program so stick around and you'll get to hear my thoughts in in the aggregate but as you can see i've already graded this bad boy i gave it five stars once again thought they did a good job laying everything out queuing it up and just start to finish this program has been generally pretty good with you know a few a few gripes here and there but you know that's to be expected so we're gonna jump right in thing number one into week number one of this capstone case study and it's just saying hey let's learn about capstone basics let's do that so uh as per usual i'm gonna go over the course syllabus make sure you got your bearings introduce the capstone project we're gonna talk about um you know they're gonna get you dipping your toes in some real world portfolios because ultimately guys what this whole the whole point of the capstone project is to give you something to walk away with that's sort of tangible right everything up to this point there's been tangible elements but it's all just part of the course now i don't want to say you're on your own but they're they're really asking for you to hey take what you learned put it to work and what you're going to be left with is something that you can show off during an interview situation that's really what they're doing you know they they emphasized out the gates that this thing was going to help you get a job well if you've been involved in the scene for any period of time you've talked to people you understand sort of like the best practices or words of wisdom that people provide in order to try to land a job in this space having a portfolio or work that you can point to and say hey i've done these sorts of things and you can check out my work here immensely valuable immensely valuable because it gives the the potential interviewer something to look at to ask you about to have you discuss with them so that's something that they've done here and i think that they did a really good job it's super important and not necessarily something that a lot of courses are covering so for that i appreciate it but they give you the opportunity here they kind of walk you through hey this is the ins and outs of building your portfolio setting up personal websites or setting up a page on github or a kaggle profile they give you examples of people's profiles and talk about how to enter competitions and start you know trying to to get more involved in that community where you can start to stand out and see what people do to stand out which is really really helpful to see the practice quiz again they're just there's no real quizzes at this point all of it is just sort of action to hey do x y z or set up this page or do this or that you'll see it here in a minute but so what for what interviewers look or employers look for in data analysts this video i thought was actually really good again i'm not going to show you the video but uh rishi here he he talks about how it's valuable to have somebody and really get a sense for how they think and what they have actual experience doing versus more theoretical and how teachable are they how well are they going to mesh with the team that sort of thing so i thought that was actually a really good two minute discussion there if you're working through it definitely check that one out and then we've got some sample cases for data analysis so they go best in class they talk about this is a really good example of what a finished product might look like so again they're kind of trying to paint this vision of hey as you work through this case study this is what it could look like they give you a checklist of hey this is what you should include in your portfolio if you're going to try to do a good job like a biography contact page resume your list of your accomplishments it sounds a lot like a blown out resume to be honest kind of like your linkedin page and then uh what to include in the case study so you're going to introduce the issue talk about the issue the problems the solutions your conclusion and what the next steps might look like and then uh examples of some case studies and questions that you might get asked some good resources there and then they they bring up revisiting career paths in the data sphere so these are theoretically some of the things that they're trying to like set you up to potentially do at some point in the future but they talk about data analysts you know for problem solving what are you doing data scientist data specialist analysis what what does analysis mean in each of those spheres and other relevant skills skills to have in each of those fields they talk through this i thought was super good this was a really smart thing that they included again trying to get you prepared for interviews or getting getting your name out there but they kind of walk through typical things that you might see in a job description so hey we're looking for a job description that talks about database stuff so hey you might say collect data by using scripting language such as sql so what you could say on your resume or in an application or something or during an interview is you've based on what you've done during this course right so you've performed sql queries you've sorted and filtered data using sql queries you've converted data types using sql functions right so it walks down all these different skills like data visualization dashboarding reporting spreadsheets and it shows you very common things that you're going to see in job descriptions in this space and what you can say that you learned from this program that you could put on your resume so you did if you've followed this this full certificate program start to finish now you're at the point where you should be able to look at this and go yeah i did all that i absolutely did all that so that will check these different boxes so good job on that i thought that was really helpful and then they give you some some more resources here if you're looking for something more technical and what you know a different path might look like for that and then we get into some next steps so this is now cueing up what's to come after week number one but basically this is the punch line so you're going to do a case study that's the capstone project so you can either do one of two pre-prepared business cases one is on the bike sharing service their membership base and one is on a streaming service subscription or you can create your own business case for yourself to analyze from your own data source so they kind of give you some ideas for how to do that you're gonna use that to perform an analysis create your online portfolio add your case study include a link to your online portfolio in linkedin and then you're going to practice your pitch for how you can talk about what you've done here in an interview situation to prepare you for eventual interviewing right so that's what this is all about gives you more resources for how to do that and with that that's the end of week number one we're gonna go into week number two it's optional but it's building your portfolio so what we're doing here is uh introduction to building this so it talks about how hey in order to complete this capstone project you're going to basically go through everything that we've done in this course which is like going through the the phases of an analysis process ask prepare process analyze and share right stating the business task clearly importing data from a real data set documenting data cleaning analyzing the data creating visualization summarizing your findings documenting your conclusions and recommendations and then creating and publishing this case study right so uh sounds like a lot it is a lot it really is so they they didn't hold back on this one i think they did they did a good job so you've got two tracks track number one is choosing one of their pre-prepared case studies track number two is by you know you basically follow this own the self-study path and they give you a bunch of resources for how you can pull your own public data sets i'm not going to talk too much about this path other than to say if you aren't interested if you've already got some data set in mind or some sort of question that you want to address or something like that then godspeed go do it go go find that data set if you want to you know look into covet or you want to look into any myriad of the things that are out there there's so much data out there go for it go do it go do something original i really appreciate that to be honest i think this is one of the pitfalls that i've seen i don't know if i've talked about this in other videos but interviewing analysts one of the biggest issues that i come across when it comes to showing off a portfolio is unoriginal work that was done in a way that very little thought it's more replication than actual critical thinking and execution so what happens is you're interviewing somebody and they want to show you something that they've created and you look at it you start asking questions they're not interested in it they barely remember what they did or why they can't go beyond pointing at what they've done and saying well i i used this or i did this query that sort of thing so it's kind of it's a big turnout it's a big you know you're building up for this like cool climax where you can nerd out and talk about something with somebody and then it just falls flat because they they copied somebody else's work so i applaud anybody who goes this path and you've got something that you're passionate about because what that means is when you get to a situation where you're sharing about it in an interview situation you're probably hopefully going to have a better story to tell not to say that you wouldn't have a good story if you go with track number one and choose one of their pre-prepared it's just a matter of being cognizant that this is an issue where people get caught up right they get caught up because they're just copying and pasting other people's work they don't care about it they don't really understand what they're doing so it shows that you can follow instruction but not that you necessarily understand what you've done which is really kind of the point okay i think that was not a side track i think that was very um uh in line with what we're talking about here so if you're curious i just kind of did the the first thing that that crossed my path here i explored the bike share navigation speedy success case study and i don't know what happens when i open this bad boy up i forget already but it's going to take you here and it gives you a pdf where it's going to show you all the ins and outs of the thing it's going to have links to all of the information that you need to download don't underestimate this guys it uh i kind of wanted to see what i could accomplish just really quickly uh pulling all the data into excel and just kind of goofing around yeah it was somewhere around 2 million rows of data spread across 12 monthly files and a whole lot of other information so i kind of chopped it down was just looking at a quarter playing around looking for inferences things that i i figured that they were trying to direct you toward kind of made some observations felt like i knew where they were going with it and sort of shut it down at that point because i'll be honest i didn't need to go to great lengths to do this sort of thing right that's not the reason that i'm taking this course or that i took this course and and pursued this thing i did this because i wanted to see what everybody had been talking about how what google's approach to this thing was how i could take this and better understand it and and have conversations with uh analysts who are interested in the program be able to give my honest opinion on what you're going to encounter in this program so i got some some look at this i didn't really do much of this else i've done my own uh case studies and things with uh public data in the past so this isn't anything new to me so then we're going to dive into track number one so it just gives you the whole rundown stuff to read about what are the questions how how is this going on lots of pdfs so they didn't necessarily put a lot of the the specifics in here they wanted you to go in and get the pdfs and dig in and treat it like a case study right and then here's the track number two resources and then once you've done that it gets into sharing uh more information about sharing your case study in your portfolio so video video video reading so creating your online portfolio again they talk about setting up an account on github kaggle tableau public if you want to go the route of like medium publishing articles and like really structuring it down wordpress or even setting up your website that seems to be very popular these days i know some people are are doing that sort of thing which is cool to each their own whatever it is that you want to do to show off your your handiwork go do it but that's week number two week number three also optional using your portfolio i you know i don't know how i feel about them making these things optional it just seems uh again sort of like why why not just say hey if you're going to do this thing we want you to do it if you want to get the certificate you gotta you know agree that you've done these things whatever they call them optional because i guess the things that they made optional just to clarify i'm not actually talking crap the things that they made optional it's sort of like the whole publishing maybe you're not comfortable doing that maybe you don't maybe you just want to have something to talk through with an employer and you can do that 100 i can tell you that i've had more productive discussions with people about work that they've done either in school as little side courses side quests or whatever you want to call it in an interview situation where they don't actually show me anything but having dialogue about it i can tell whether they do or don't know what they're talking about i don't need them to show me necessarily all the ins and outs it's nice to have not required so in that sense i guess i understand why they kind of made this stuff optional because maybe you're not ready to publish your work and that's totally okay don't feel obligated but understand that while it may be scary up up front this community is usually super supportive and they love to see other people doing cool stuff and giving advice whether solicited or not usually it's always trying to lead towards a better end product so if you finally do get the confidence up to share your work don't be scared if people people will generally be very supportive so just basically don't let you hold that don't let that hold you back okay we get into uh the interview process so this is uh this is a part yeah i wanted to gripe about this i feel like i i've gotten to a point where there's something i've got to complain about in every single course and this is the one that i have here so what they do here is they sort of set the stage for this is what an interview process looks like okay i would like to say that this is not in fact what every interview process looks like for a an analyst position in fact maybe this is what it looks like at google maybe this is what it looks like at larger companies who have proper hr departments who have recruiters who are actually screening candidates and then sending them you know up the chain to various persons but most companies especially those that are early in the analytics build-out phase they've only got one analyst or maybe they're trying to hire their first analyst it's not going to be the structured it's probably not going to follow this format here where hey this is the first part where you're going to get called by a recruiter and they're going to just walk through your resume and make sure that you sound like you've got it all together i don't disagree with that part but again not every company has recruiters that are going to be doing this stuff if you get reached out to by a hiring manager they may just be setting up an interview straight away you may not get this feel out question because they're just anxious to get resumes okay so this may or may not happen depending on the size of the company stage two the case study uh no um again larger companies with more resources may immediately jump into the technical screening which is what this effectively is but i would say that 98 of the interviews i've either given or been in uh go this route where stage 3 which they're calling optional is what happens next which is you go in you sit down and you have a mixture of behavioral and some technical questions that are asked right what they're trying to do is get you in front of a few different people who may be direct hiring management maybe hr maybe some combination of the two but basically you're sitting down with these people and you start to get to know them they want to make sure that you feel like you're a good fit and that you are a you have the technical acumen at least to get in and do some of the work so i would actually argue that more commonly this happens next a lot of companies don't have tests they don't have the case study it does happen 100 be prepared for that sort of thing and this capstone project will help you to do that this whole program will help you to be prepared but i i've only been in a couple again of all of the interviews there's only been a couple times that i've encountered something like this and it usually happens if i feel um well if it's happened to me it's part of the process usually you know after i've already passed those initial hurdles if it's if it's something that i've issued it's not necessarily front loaded it's just kind of part of the process because these things i don't view as a pass or fail right it depends on the role it depends on the person it depends on the potential i see because i used to administer like an excel test to a lot of people which by the way you can get you can check it out i've got it on my my website i'll put a link in the description but if you want to learn how to take that technical test i'll give you a link to that but the uh we would administer it and people who passed it the technical part with flying colors didn't necessarily get an offer because it either wasn't a good fit from a behavioral perspective maybe their experience was just too different or maybe things just didn't work out in another regard but then people who didn't pass it but who showed potential for you know being teachable asking questions and you know we had confidence that this person could ramp up very quickly they might have gotten an offer right so these things are not pass fail don't treat them like that don't freak out if you leave and you're like man i didn't ace that case study depends on the company but in general i would say don't sweat over that they want to see how you think they want to see how you work under pressure and you know are you teachable where get their bearings on you okay so it doesn't really sound like i'm griping i'm just trying to explain sort of my perspective on this it's not as structured as it looks um and then decision making and i don't want to get too much into this because that's going to be different at every company uh in general but i will say that i am also so i mentioned the excel test i'm also in the process of wrapping up what is going to be in analytics interview workshop so we're going to go over the secrets of analytics interviews i will also be sure to update this description when that course is available but it's going to be coming very soon and i'm really excited about that one because it's going to walk through a lot of this stuff and give you a behind-the-scenes look and cover all of this full spectrum that we're sort of talking about here so quick plug to myself scenario video series introduction so this is just i don't uh i i'm not entirely sure this is what to say about this other than they talk about how to discuss um oh no no that's not what they're doing so this is in the interview what they do from here is they actually give you examples of what an interview scenario might look like and i thought this was pretty cool they have like these mock interview situations and show people how to how they would answer their questions and all that kind of stuff so you can see it there's something different about like reading it and seeing it and um up to this point i've really appreciated you know both sides but i really like the reading component this case it's fun to watch somebody in an interview situation there's lots of value that you get from that so i thought that was cool and that was uh that's pretty much week number three there's some more tips you know obviously if hey if there's a job description you want your resume to overlap with those skills and you always want to quantify things and you know take your work experience into consideration and come ready to ask questions of the person right this is interviewing 101 week number three is wrapped and now we're on to week number four and this is putting your certificate to work so uh in case you missed it somewhere in the middle of all of this you've done the case study right so i think week number two was really like executing on the case study week one was sort of queuing it up week two was uh you know actually executing and then week number three is preparing for interviews and now we're going to wrap the whole program up so hey did you complete it yes or no congratulations on completing it now let's get ready to showcase your work so these are all the things that you've done these are things that you can use to update your linkedin profile do all that fun stuff go get collect your badges it talks about how to sign up for their big interview platform uh once i had wrapped this up i started getting emails about like the job boards and things like that so if that's something that you were interested in when you pursued this bad boy then that all comes once you're done but that was it that was the course so now i just want to do a real quick recap of like the whole thing in a nutshell so eight courses uh i think the only one that i didn't give five stars was uh ask questions to make data driven decisions i think was the one yeah i gave that one a little bit of a ding just because i i remember being somewhat disappointed in the fact that hey it wasn't all about that they had a bunch of side sidebar things that they talked about it wasn't necessarily as focused as i would have liked and i was really excited about that particular section and so it was a little bit of a letdown but overall this google has done a very good job with this course i would very much recommend it for anybody who is interested in doing this now that said who is this good for they try to promote it as an a substitute for a degree i kind of i've said in other interviews and probably in some of these things that i don't know that that's ever going to happen or at least not soon it could but what i feel like it's a substitute less for a degree in general but more for a degree in analytics or computer science or something of a a degree that is more specific to this field set so what i mean by that is this program is going to be best for people who don't have the traditional educational background but want to get into analytics be that a student who just graduated with an unrelated degree or a professional who has an undergrad unrelated degree and or career field who's looking to switch so if you are in one of those buckets then this would be a really good course for you to get that exposure get that background get some foundational skills and then have this capstone project to point to and say like look i may not have the degree or i may not have the work experience i may not have any of those things but i've gone out of my way to do this thing on my own i've learned all of these skills you can check out my portfolio i can talk intelligently about this i can talk about sql i can talk about tableau i can talk about r i can use spreadsheets and yada yada yada you understand the analytical process you can see why those things would all be good for anybody but if you've gone through a good program you have that degree chances are you've already taken courses where you've done some of these things and you've already gotten the exposure so you can already talk about those things if you cannot this is a good course this is a very good course for you to consider and again it's not like a lot of the others that are out there today that are very technical focused i want to add one more piece of color to that i've been reading i read all the comments i i try to respond to everything that i see i still get asked for answers which is hilarious i will not provide answers but one very valid criticism that i saw recently was i didn't think that this isn't me this is the comments but uh there there were people who did not believe that it went deep enough on the technical i think that that's okay because again technical can be taught there is enough technical foundation to to let you explore and use and follow through and you have something to show for it the most important thing is really the context that's speaking from somebody in my position the most important thing is that the person has context right so if you have the the understanding of what each i keep going back to this right if you understand the different tools that are out there how to use them what they're good for maybe what they're not so good for uh and you have the mindset of an analyst then you're an analyst right if it's not about being able to go super deep on every single tool that's out there that's not what's important what's important is your thought process what is important the the tools don't make the analyst you're the analyst you use the tools okay so understanding that the more you use the tools the better you will be at using them learning what they're good for all that fun stuff this course does a very good job of teaching you what those tool uh what some of those tools are and what they are used for that to me is the most important thing when looking at a new analyst okay and again i have to remind everybody this is a beginner course this is this is a course designed for people who are interested in starting a career in data analysis okay this is not for intermediate this is not for advanced this is for beginners so all that to say what as a person who hires new analysts uh what is important to me is that they understand what the role is what an analyst does why they do what they do all of that stuff not that they're an expert in any one of these technical skills that will come that will come all right and with that i think we're finally done i think we're done here so i hope you enjoyed uh if you've watched all of these all of these uh reviews i applaud you for putting up with my face and voice for that long but uh this has been a lot of fun i really enjoy this if you're interested in seeing me walk through other courses either on coursera udemy you name it i'm more than happy to do that i plan to do that and just drop them in the comments so and with that i do make new video content once every week if not more on all things data analytics careers so if you're interested in that please consider subscribing to my channel not everything is a course review i do have other content that talks about you know tips for different things i've covered what it means to be an analyst how to think like an analyst all of that fun stuff so again if you've got content ideas i'd love to hear them in the comments and with that thanks for watching

Channel: Matt Brattin

Views: 8,802

Rating: 4.9390244 out of 5

Keywords: Google Data Analytics Certificate Course 8 of 8 - Capstone Case Study + Full Program Impressions, Google Data Analytics Certificate, Capstone Case Study, Building your portfolio, data analyst, data analytics, google data analytics certification, data analysis, google certification, google certificate data analyst, google data analyst course, data analytics certification, career change, data analytics course, data analyst job, data analytics jobs

Id: YnsY6mBS1sA

Length: 29min 14sec (1754 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 07 2021