Hadoop Education is Vital to Big Data Analysis

Hadoop is a key Big Data technology, but to date very few universities have included it in their undergraduate or graduate curriculums

B-Eye-Network, Alex Buttery, May 15, 2012

Hadoop Hadoop is one of the up-and-coming technologies for performing analysis on big data, but to date very few universities have included it in their undergraduate or graduate curriculums. In a February 2012 article from InfoWorld, those already using the technology issued the warning that "Hadoop requires extensive training along with analytics expertise not seen in many IT shops today." A ComputerWorld article singled out MIT and UC Berkeley as having already added Hadoop training and experience to their curriculums. Other educational institutions need to seek out practitioners in their area or poll alumni to determine if individuals that can impart their knowledge to college students are available and if so, prepare a curriculum to start training the next generation of IT employees and imbue them with the skills they will require to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

... Hadoop is a combination of many tools and software products of which the primary two are HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and MapReduce. In its current form, these components run primarily on the Linux operating system. Both of these components are Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and are licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

... A recent ComputerWorld article mentions that the terms "Hadoop" and "data scientist" are starting to show up in job postings and that some of the most well-known organizations are posting these job requirements. The article mentions that Google has reported that the search term "data scientist" is 20 times higher - so far - in the first quarter of 2012 than it was in the last quarter of 2011 and that there were 195 job listings on Dice.com that mentioned this term. This indicates that the market for technical skills in IT and statistics is growing very quickly as businesses are realizing that this new technology can provide real value to their organizations. They will require a new IT specialty called "data science" to analyze the data extracted and processed using Hadoop and using statistical analysis to derive beneficial insights.

To address the shortage of individuals entering the workforce with the skills necessary to effectively utilize technologies like Hadoop, educational institutions need to offer courses in data analysis and data mining using statistical modeling methods as well as more specialized courses in Hadoop technologies like HDFS and MapReduce.

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Editor: There are Hadoop and related courses from MapR and other providers - see