Pursuing an education in data mining/analytics

[JShepp20]

This is my first post. I'm brand new to the idea of data mining/analytics and have a hundred questions, but I'll try to keep this as short and sweet as possible.

After getting my bachelor's in finance a few years ago, I took a position as a cost accountant with a small industrial minerals company. This position allowed me the freedom to experiment on a very small scale in the wold of data mining, and the process of transforming information into usable intelligence. I've really taken a great interest in it.

I've utilized webinars made available through my company's accounting software to learn how to write SQL queries in excel for custom reports and I've been able to apply these skills to other areas of my job. I understand that this is extraordinarily elementary, but I really enjoy it and really wish to further my education on the subject. This brings me to my question.

I understand the demand for data scientists is extraordinarily high right now, and I would love to position myself with an education that would be appealing to hiring managers in the industry. I would like to know if anybody has an opinion on where I should start. Balancing a full time job with a family, obtaining another bachelor's degree would be a challenge - although not an impossible one with the vast amount of online options that are available. That said, I'm already in a substantial amount of debt from my first degree and feel that the majority of that money was spent on courses that I did not need. This time around, I'd like to get right down to the meat and potatoes. I've looked at online certificate programs like the ones available through statistics.com and those seem very appealing. I just don't know how those programs are viewed by hiring managers in this job market.

This has gotten too long, so I'll leave it at that. If anyone has any input on which use of time and resources would be the most beneficial, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[editor]

There are many free courses on analytics / data mining - see
http://www.kdnuggets.com/2013/02/online-courses-statistics-machine-learning-analytics.html

http://www.kdnuggets.com/2013/04/caltech-free-online-course-learning-from-data.html

I would also encourage you to learn Python (easier than R) and to try some Kaggle competitions