Google Data Analytics Professional Certification on Coursera - First Look

google just launched their google data analytics professional certificate on coursera last week after almost a year of teasers we finally know exactly what's included how much it costs and what they're proposing that you can do with this certificate we're digging into all of that today and looking at whether this is really a replacement for a four-year degree like google's claiming i've partnered with coursera for this video if you want to check out the certificate program for yourself at any time there's a link down in the description which will take you directly to it where you can sign up for a seven day free trial to check it out for yourself what is the google data analytics professional certificate this program is seven courses plus an optional capstone that's meant to prepare people for entry-level roles in data analytics primarily junior data analysts and associate data analyst positions spread over their recommended time frame of nine months for completing the program it should take less than five hours worth of work per week you can take it at any speed you want though so if you have a month to dedicate to it and you want to spend many hours each day working on it you can certainly do that and finish the program faster everything is done at your own pace this certificate program is one of the newest in a series of similar professional certificates from google we'll talk a little bit more about those later because i think there's some helpful insights that will tell us a little bit about this particular program as well before we get into exactly what's in the courses let's talk about cost this program is priced at 39 per month for the course and you pay for how long you're enrolled so that's where there is some incentive to complete it sooner if you can do it in six months or three months or anything shy of the nine months it's going to be less expensive coursera also offers coursera plus which gives you access to over 3 000 courses on their platform and that's priced at 49 a month so if there's courses outside of this program that you might want to take that could be a pretty cost effective option to just go ahead and go for coursera plus instead of just signing up for this certificate program now the nitty gritty details what exactly is covered in this program i'm going to walk briefly through each of the courses that are in the program i'll show on screen more of the detailed points and just talk at a high level of what's included in each of these courses if we look at just the high level picture from google here's how they describe the program through practical hands-on assignments and projects learners will develop confidence using a series of tools and platforms including spreadsheets sql slides jupyter notebooks tableau and r here's how those seven courses break down course one is foundations data data everywhere this covers key data analytics topics and it's designed to give you more of an overview of what's coming in the entire program it's taught by current data analysts as are the rest of the courses they instruct and provide you with hands-on ways to accomplish common data analyst tasks with the best tools and resources in course two you'll look at asking questions to make data-driven decisions this is such a critical part of work as a data analyst or business analyst anybody that's working with data should know how to ask effective questions so that you can make good decisions and you can also connect with the needs of your stakeholders in course three you'll look at how to prepare your data for exploration you'll learn how to use tools like spreadsheets and sql to extract and make sure that you're using the right data for your goals and you'll also look at how to organize and protect your data course 4 looks at processing data from dirty to clean so you'll learn how to check and clean your data using spreadsheets and sql as well as how to verify and report your data cleaning results the next course is analyzing data to answer questions in this course you'll explore the analyze phase of the data analysis process you'll take what you've learned up until now and put it all together to understand the data you've collected how to organize it how to format it and how to look and think about your data in different ways you also learned some about creating calculations on your data to help you meet the business goals that you have this course covers formulas functions and sql queries that help you conduct your analysis in course 6 you'll share data through the art of visualization this course focuses on tableau to analyze and visualize your data through dashboards and individual visualizations course 7 gets into data analysis with our programming you'll use rstudio for this course and learn how to clean organize analyze visualize and report data optionally you can also complete the google data analytics capstone at the end of the course this is a case study that's meant to help prepare you for your job hunt i'd highly recommend doing the capstone project you should do more than one case study before you jump into applying for jobs especially if you're changing careers and you don't have any past experience and analytics your only reference point to talk with employers about your skills is going to be these types of case studies or projects that you do if all you can talk about is one case study that you've done that doesn't show a lot of depth to your skill set i'd highly recommend that you create multiple of these both to build your skills and your confidence but also to give you more material to talk about on your resume and in your interviews the most intriguing part of the certificate program to me is that google claims this is a replacement for a four-year college degree let's dive into that does the google data analytics professional certificate really replaced college google's released several statements about this and last year their svp of global affairs tweeted that google is treating these professional certificates the data analytics and the it ones as the equivalent of a four-year degree when hiring for related roles i think these certificate programs have a lot of potential but i'm very skeptical of them being replacements for four-year degrees outside of google i would be very hesitant to recommend to someone coming out of high school that's considering the certificate program or college to just do the certificate program i think for quite a long time a college degree is still going to carry a lot of value in this area and you'll be able to cover a lot more than you can cover just in the certificate program like any boot camp or short-term program there's just only so much information that can be taught and so much you can learn in the given time period and that's where a good college program that takes multiple years that goes more in depth on these topics is going to give you a deeper understanding of a lot of the work that you're doing here it's helpful to look at the google it support professional certificate that's been available for a few years now the american council on education evaluates learning opportunities courses training from institutions that aren't accredited they look at the quality content and scope of training to recommend how these trainings should transfer to a college degree how much credit should you get for taking these in the case of the google i.t support certificate they recommend it be comparable to 12 hours of lower level undergraduate study to put that in perspective most bachelor's degrees require at least 120 hours of credits there's increasing discussion around the value of college versus more dedicated training programs in certain areas while we do see some movement in this area especially in the tech sector the reality in the us canada and many other countries is that you're still going to be expected to have a bachelor's degree to work in these roles especially as you progress into more advanced technical roles this may change in the future but it's something to definitely keep in mind as you evaluate if this is the right choice for you speaking of that google it support certificate let's talk a little bit more about the results people have gotten from this i found a lot of good antidotes of people finding it helpful that they thought that they learned things that some people were able to get entry-level jobs though some people also referenced that while they got an entry-level job with it maybe they weren't even asked about this education and so it's hard to say whether it actually contributed to them getting hired or not i did find one really good survey by indeed that asked people that have this certification on their program about the results that they got with it you can see the results on your screen right now 39 of the 276 job seekers that were polled said that earning their professional certification helped them get a job 93 said they'd recommend it to a family member or friend even though this may not have directly led to a job or directly contributed to getting a job as a result of the certification program it seems that most people find it helpful and that's what i found anecdotally i did find some people saying that it's a little basic that there were some mistakes but also that it seems to have improved over the years as they've had a chance to refine it more and even some people that are fairly experienced that thought that it was a good refresher course for things that maybe they didn't work with as often or were newer updates over what their training might have been we get to the big question should you take the google data analytics professional certification i'm optimistic about the value that can come out of this program for the price point forty dollars thirty nine dollars a month if you're just taking this course i think that it has potential for tremendous value i haven't personally had a chance to take any of the courses myself though if that's something you're interested in if you'd like me to go through a portion of the course or most of the course and give a more thorough review on that i'd be happy to do it let me know down in the comments if that's something that you're interested in while i am skeptical that this is really a replacement for college i do think that it can still have tremendous value it can help build start building those skills that you'll need and while you'll probably need to do more than just take this course it could be a good foundation like i said given the price point there's very little to lose in trying it out and starting to build your skills there this certification right now is only available in the us and canada so unfortunately there's a lot of people that it's not available to i'm curious to see if this is something that gets expanded in the future the it professional certificates also have just been limited to the us and canada so far so i don't have a lot of reason to believe that it's going to be expanded anytime soon but i also haven't seen any statements from google either way about it there's certainly quite a bit of interest in other locations from what i saw as i was researching this course let me know down in the comments if you're thinking about checking out the course thank you so much for watching you

Channel: The Career Force

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Keywords: google data analytics professional certificate, google analytics certification, data analytics professional, data analyst certification, google data analyst, google data analyst professional certificate, data analyst, data scientist, the career force, data analytics, data science, data analyst job, google professional, google professional it certificate

Id: cywuo3Jv0U0

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 16 2021