They became Data Analysts with THIS - Google Data Analytics Certificate: One Year Later

Key Takeaways

[Music] this piece of paper has been getting a lot of attention career certificate google career certificate career certificates what they call career certificates and for good reason google is claiming you can get an entry-level job provide job-ready skills with no degree or experience required and it's not just google another 150 employers are claiming this as well committed to hire hundreds and even thousands and the barrier to entry to get one of these certificates is surprisingly low in roughly six months and the cost here in the united states would be about two hundred and forty dollars per person but this claim of accepting a certificate over a degree needs to be investigated so let's talk to some real certificate holders whether this will get you a job as a data analyst and i think the results may surprise you if i had just done the certificate and stop i wouldn't have this job right i did not mention that i have a certificate i don't think it necessarily means you're gonna get a job from it what i'm done nerds i'm luke a data analyst and my channel is all about tech and skills for data science and last year around this time i released a video where i talked to three recent graduates of the google data analytics certificate program paul from lebanon was in school at the time for engineering and was looking to combine this with data analytics anand from india had suffered setbacks to his filmmaking business during the pandemic and was looking for a career change and then antonio from america had recently completed business school and had just started his first job as a data analyst i spoke with them all only a few short months after the release of the certificate and they had a lot of positive comments but i'll be honest at the time the results were still out there on whether this certificate provided value mainly only one of the three had landed a full-time role as a data analyst and the other two were still actively searching so i reached out and reconnected to find out their thoughts on the certificate a year later along with a new certificate holder as well susannah i feel like one of the reasons i got the job is because i was before we get into this i want to give a shout out to our sponsor coursera hold up um how can you investigate a certificate while being sponsored by the same company that hosts it that's actually a good point and i'm glad you brought it up sellout so i actually came up to the video idea myself and then asked coursera if they would sponsor this video coursera has been really good with putting me in touch with these interviewees and these interviewees have no obligation to coursera or google so really they're free to tell me whatever they want but come on isn't this just a way for google to get richer interesting enough google doesn't generate any revenue off these certificates and along with coursera they offer need-based scholarships as they feel education should be accessible by all and we're living through some crazy times right now coursera has stepped up and is providing over 5000 courses to ukrainian higher education institutions on top of all the courses they're already providing to refugees of ukraine oh so you're done um i'm gonna get some coffee all right let's get into hearing from the certificate holders themselves in order to understand the usefulness of the certificate we need to better understand where everybody was coming from in order to land their job in data analytics so let's start with susannah who has a unique background of transitioning from an undergrad in engineering into education my friend was like oh did you come over and teach for a year in korea and i was like sure after this she decided to get her masters in education and work in the industry focusing on literacy because of the pandemic i ended up losing my job i was trying to get a job at another literacy organization here and it didn't come through which was similar to a nonce issue during the pandemic so similar to him she wanted to capitalize on her past experience i feel like i can probably get a job doing some kind of analysis in early education because there are not many people who have a master's in early education that do analytics and susanna's strategy is a very common one used to get a job take paul the recent engineering graduate i looked for jobs that combined transportation engineering with data science from there after getting the certificate he went on to apply to roughly 50 jobs which he said surprisingly not as much as a lot of people referring to his fellow engineering classmates a lot of people i know have applied to over 200 companies in the case of the former business studio antonio this was very true and i would just sit there all day and apply and apply and apply i think i probably only heard back from maybe a handful maybe less than maybe 10 or less jobs probably like five five or six jobs out of 200 250. so how can this google certificate help with the job search i i did it really to help reinforce what i had on my resume they also i believe offered like i i think i showed you the platform for like searching through jobs and stuff like that so i was i wanted to get access to that to see what they had on there basically now this employer consortium that certificate holders have access to has slowly grown over the past year from 130 to 150 employers however i haven't found much success from finding a job from this well initially at least deloitte reached out to me for a job uh interview i like on without me applying or anything but i already had a job lined up already so i was like well that's unfortunate so i think many people new to hearing about this program think that you just show this certificate to an employer and then you're handed a job in return when in actuality it's a lot harder than this but i did find from the interviewees that they implemented a common strategy to take value out of the certificate and land a job the way i went about this is to talk about the projects that i worked on with the knowledge that i gained from the certificate in my case i used um so i was interested in autonomous vehicles as a transportation engineer so i made a project out of it ananth the former filmmaker took the same approach so they did bring up my portfolio during the interviews they were like uh okay you did this could you please explain uh what you did in this because i was invested in those projects i was able to really clearly explain to them what i did and why i did it and that i think made for a good conversation point of the interview and these self-curated projects had the hidden benefit of highlighting the skills he wanted to capitalize on everyone can do but my strong point was i can visualize data i can summarize data so that is what i use my portfolio for and it made for a great talking point so where do you find projects well susanna reached out to our favorite podcast in order to see if they needed help with analytics i need to get some kind of experience doing this and so i emailed them i was like hey can i do data analysis for you they were like yes please and how she found this was quite simple ah because i listen to a lot of their episodes and they talk about we don't do that she then used the analytical skills she had learned in a real world project and she actually found an interesting insight about the podcast the episodes that people really love are not really the ones that are in their top 30. since susannah has offered her pro bono work the podcast has gone on to double its listens so ultimately did this help with landing her future job yeah i really think so uh just because i got to talk about something i was doing so let's conclude with this major insight from paul yeah i still think that it's more about the projects you work on your experience and just showing that you tried to solve a problem by yourself you used some platforms to do it you know how to make visualizations you know how to code and you know how to make a story out of the project and make people interested in it and this is why the google certificate is so dominant in those first seven modules it teaches you everything you need to know and then that last module it gets you out there and start building a project in order to gain experience combining all these strategies with a certificate what is everybody now doing let's start with paul who looked for jobs that combined transportation engineering with data science i ended up finding the transportation analyst rule which combined his two passions within a single job i do transportation engineering work as in like travel demand modeling and forecasting but as an analyst i work on making dashboards maps visualizations and really the goal is to make the data simple and useful for our communities to use it and to make decisions susana took a very similar approach and was able to find a role that needed her prior degree and experience in the education industry i am a data management analyst at a publishing company and we publish diverse children's books i feel like one of the reasons i got the job is because i was like i'm like very passionate about early literacy and like especially the types of books that they uh that they publish so what happens if you're not looking to combine your knowledge from a degree with your skills and data analytics well annott was able to capitalize on his previous work as a filmmaker and transition into a related field in marketing and advertising it's going really well and i'm adapting really well to the job it's basically like a bit of data analytics a bit of web development the job he landed requires web development which is not a typical tool set for data analysts so his company is supporting him with learning these skills i went in just with my knowledge of sql and r and tableau not just the normal starter data analytics stuff but over here now i'm learning a lot of networking https uh javascript and for antonio he's continued to work and progress in his career as a quality assurance analyst a lot of what i do day to day is like uh fixing people's problems they pop up is kind of the idea behind it if there's probable like problems with our data or there's stuff like that i'll go investigate it and i'm also in charge of like uh dealing with the input of data that we receive and this is actually a pretty common way that i found all the interviewees describe their role as a data analyst i basically help everyone with their problems so what tools are everybody using to solve these problems the certificate focuses on four main tools focusing heavily on sql and spreadsheets for good reason as we'll find out and also on r and tableau yeah i use mostly sql i actually do use sql most part of it is a sql and because sql is used so much it commonly comes up in interviews my very first round was very sql heavy when i did the interview for my job they asked me like sql whiteboard questions now this tool was clearly the main focus when employers were going through the hiring process but once everybody landed their jobs there was also another tool that everyone used as well okay you are a data analyst you have multiple tools and at your hand to work with data but the people you are sharing data with they only have just that one tool to look at it and that's spreadsheets so excel is going to go out of style and for antonio in our last video he got some criticism in the comments section for his views on the certificate and i do think in the beginning it focuses too much on like xl i think people misconstrue to us i i don't think it should be a big focus i think it should be something that's shown but i thought the sequel stuff was more important i also think that they shouldn't have used r as the programming language antonio well he opens up a highly debated area of this r versus python debate and the reality of this was experienced by susannah who had issues in the job search because of this everyone was looking for python they want you to have sql and python and i never done python before but both susanna and paul went on to find jobs that needed their r skills so i don't think this is a deal breaker now i could go on all day about this r versus python debate and i could make a whole video about it which i did and you can find it here so we're going to continue on so for the last tool of tableau no one really had any complaints about this and paul shared this insight on learning any visualization software it really takes only a week or two to understand how to make a dashboard and so summing up what you should understand about learning all these tools of sql spreadsheets and programming languages you don't have to be an expert in it they just want to know that you're comfortable in using it you're interested in using it and you just know when to use it all right so let's pull all these concepts together now and understand what everybody thinks about the google certificate a year later kind of like change what i've kind of thought about it um not in a bad way but like i think that the perspective i had was like uh i want to do data science but i think if you want to be a data analyst the certificate was more met for that and for that i think it's free i don't think it necessarily means you're going to get a job from it but i do think it gives you a good starting point and that was the general consensus i found from everybody i do think that the certificate is a great place to start i would say is that it is a definitely a great place to start off so it will it will give you the confidence to move forward as uh is what my opinion is uh you know because it has this way of introducing everything to you uh which makes it very clear and susanna added this unique perspective the google analytics was great because it was a really good starting point they had like a very diverse group of teachers i thought it was great they did have a lot of women which it was was for me very encouraging so how long can you expect to spend to get the certificate for susannah who was focusing on it solely while she was transitioning jobs she finished it in about a month and a half then paul who was a full-time student while completing it feels that for those that are working concurrently during it realistic timeline should be three months for it and finally let's end this with two main insights first is that this certificate is the beginning of your learnings which makes it very clear in the certificate itself that you have to learn more if i had just done the certificate and stopped i wouldn't have this job right and then lastly use these learnings to showcase your experience in a project like i did not mention that i had the certificate in any of my interviews but the way i went about this is to talk about the projects that i worked on with the knowledge that i gained from the certificate so if you want to dive into this certificate like these interviewees did you can use the link in my description to access it the certificate is 39 us dollars a month but if money is a concern coursera always has options such as financial aid to support you in getting best and with that if you're curious about learning what paul and antonio's perspective was last year on the certificate check out this video right here as always if you got value out of this video smash that like button with that we'll see you in the next one