6 Data Science Certificates To Level Up Your Career

Photo by Lewis Keegan on Unsplash.

Because of the appeal of the field of data science and the premise of high incomes, more and more people decide to join the field every day. Some may come from a technical background, while others just join in due to curiosity; regardless of the reason you decide to join the field, your no. 1 goal will probably be to have a strong, solid portfolio that can help you land the job you want.

So, how can you increase the appeal of your portfolio?

Although getting into data science doesn’t necessarily require any degrees or certificates, sometimes having some could help make you stand out in the applicants' pool when applying for a job.

What makes a good data science portfolio is collecting projects that show your skills, prove your knowledge, and demonstrate your ability to build solid data science projects. That’s the core of a good portfolio, but you can also add some certificates to prove that you put in the time, effort, and money to hone your skills and become a more qualified data scientist.

Luckily, not all certificates you can get require you to go to a testing center. In fact, most of the desirable data science certificates can be taken from the comfort of your couch.

This article presents you with 6 highly desirable certificates that you can obtain to increase your chances of landing an internship or your dream job.

Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Scientist Associate

Microsoft is one of the leading names of technology and software; they offer a certificate that aims to measure your ability to run experiments, train machine learning models, optimize your model's performance, and deploy it using the Azure Machine Learning workspace.

To obtain this certificate, you will need to pass one exam, and you can prepare for this exam in one of two ways. Microsoft offers free online materials that you can self-study to prepare for the exam. If you prefer having an instructor, they also offer a paid option where an Azure machine learning instructor can tutor you.

This exam will cost around $165. The price varies based on the country you will proctor the test from.

IBM Data Science Professional Certificate

This certificate comes from IBM and is offered at the end of a course series that takes you from being a complete data science beginner to a professional data scientist online and at your own pace.

IBM Data science professional certificate is offered on both Coursera and edX. On either platform, you have to complete a set of courses covering all the core knowledge of data science to get the certificate and an IBM badge once you’re done.

To get the certificate from Coursera, you will need to pay a fee of $39 per month, so the sooner you can finish the series, the less you will need to pay. On the other hand, edX requires $793 for the full course experience regardless of how long you will talk to complete it.

Google Professional Data Engineer Certification

Google’s professional data engineer certification is aimed to examine the skills you need to be qualified as a data engineer. A data engineer can make data-driven decisions, build reliable models, train, test and optimize them.

You can get this certificate by applying directly through the official Google certificate page, or you can take a course series and the certificate on Coursera. The courses will teach you all you need to know about machine learning and AI fundamentals and build efficient data pipelines and analytics.

To access the course series on Coursera, you will need to have Coursera Plus or pay a fee of $49 per month for as long as you need to finish the series and obtain your certificate.

Cloudera Certified Professional (CCP) Data Engineer

Cloudera targets open-source developers and offers the CCP Data Engineer certificate for developers to test their ability to collect, process, and analyze data efficiently on the Cloudera CDH environment.

To pass this exam, you will be given 5-10 data science problems, each with its own large dataset and CDH cluster. Your task will be to find a high-precision solution for each of these problems and implement it correctly.

To take this exam, you will need to score at least 70% in the exam. The exam will be 4 hours long and will cost you $400. You can take this exam anywhere online.

SAS Certified AI & Machine Learning Professional

Unlike the certificates we discussed so far, the SAS AI & Machine Learning Professional certificate is acquired by passing three exams that test three different skill sets. The three exams you will need to pass to get the certificate are:

1. Machine learning exam where your skills to build, train, test performance and optimize supervised machine learning models will be tested.
2. Forecast and optimization test. In this test, your ability to handle, visualize data, build data pipelines and solve optimization problems will be tested.
3. NLP and computer vision test.

SAS offers a free 30 days worth of preparation materials that will get you ready to take and pass each of these three exams.

TensorFlow Developer Certificate

TensorFlow is one of the widely used packages for machine learning, AI, and deep learning applications. The TensorFlow Developer Certificate is given to a developer to demonstrate their ability to use TensorFlow to develop solutions for machine learning and deep learning problems.

You can prepare for this certificate by finishing the DeepLearning.AI TensorFlow Developer Professional Certificate Coursera course series. Once you have earned this certificate, your name and picture will be added to the Google Developers webpage.

The TensorFlow Developer Certificate is valid for 3 years. Afterward, you will need to retake the test to keep your skill level synced with the TensorFlow package's recent updates.

Takeaways

If you ask any data scientist whether they needed their degree or certificate to land their job roles, most will tell you that they got into data science from a non-technical background with a curious mind that only wanted to learn more.

And even though you can become a data scientist and get a good job by self-studying the core concepts of data science and building real-life-sized projects or projects that can be applied easily to real-life data, sometimes having a certificate can help make your portfolio stand out and attract the eyes of recruiters to you.

Because data science is one of the popular fields today, you will find a redundant amount of tutorials and guides online on what you need to do to become a “good data scientist” or “how to land your dream data science role.” Not to mention the tons of certificates that you can get and free courses you can take to improve your skills. I have been where you are, overwhelmed by the amount of information out there about data science and how to get into the field. But, I always appreciated simple, straightforward articles that get to the point without dragging the topic too long.

Original. Reposted with permission.

Related:

• Data science certification – why it is important and where to get it?
• 10 resources for data science self-study
• 7 Most Recommended Skills to Learn to be a Data Scientist