What's the best certificate for data analysts? Google vs IBM Data Analyst Certificate

Key Takeaways

hey guys how's it going so a couple weeks back i did a review of the google data analytics professional certificate and you guys seem to really enjoy that video and i've gotten some comments asking me to do a comparison between the ibm data analytics certificate and the google one agenda for today is that first we'll be doing an overview of the google certificate and then the ibm certificate and then i'll be going and talking about the differences between them as well as the pros and cons and then we'll go into what i think is more suitable towards which people like what is best for me which individual and my personal choice if i were to choose between the two before i get started i wanted to do a shout out to luke baroos he did an awesome video covering the google certificate versus ibm certificate he did a really really great job covering it's actually referencing some of the material that he covers and building upon that so you should definitely check out his video if you haven't already alright let's get started so quick overview of the google data analytics professional certificate it's around 260 hours in total and it covers seven courses and a capstone project so here is the google data analytics professional certificate so first of all it starts this certificate starts completely from scratch now in terms of the tech stack you'll be learning spreadsheets sql r programming as well as tableau for visualization i'll be going more into detail about this when i will do a comparison between the ibm certificate and the google one in terms of teaching style most of the course is going to be talking headstyle videos very well productionized i must say and uh that's gonna be mixed together with some material that you read through and a lot of practical questions hundreds of different questions as well as applied labs and assignments this certificate also has a huge emphasis on career development not only do they go into a lot of detail within the courses about how to actually use this information that you learn and put that into a portfolio for example we're like you know how to put on your resume so you can get a job afterwards they also explicitly said that they themselves will be hiring people who complete this certificate in addition to that after you complete the certificate you get access to a career hub in which there's over 130 different companies that will be hiring people directly from the people who complete the certificate which is a huge deal because companies are literally pledged to hire people who complete their certificate and these people don't need to have any experience in data analysis or data science or anything like that all right now let's do an overview of ibm certificate ibm certificate is a little bit shorter it's at 140 hours and it has eight courses and a capstone project let's take a look alright so this is the ibm data analyst professional certificate and if you actually scroll through it i look at the courses it also starts from scratch with a intro to data analytics so in terms of the text them they have microsoft excel and for sql they use ibm cloud and then after that they use python and then finally for visualization they use a lesser known visualization tool called cognos so the ibm data analytics certificate is also really really applied they have hundreds of questions embedded within their courses and on top of that they have the capstone project and they also have labs as well because they're both hosted on coursera they follow the same subscription model of 39 per month in the united states they also both offer financial aid but that's actually where the similarities and if you go through both certificates you'll find that you have a very very different experience so i actually went um in for both of these certificates and went through them and did some video lectures did some of the assessments and and partially to some of the labs as well just to get like a feel for how the teaching style is and kind of like what the materials without further ado let's go into some of their differences a big difference between them is that google is 260 hours while ibm is 100 around 130 140 hours probably the biggest key difference in my mind is that google has much has a far greater emphasis on career development a lot of the additional material that actually makes the google certificate longer than the ibm one is about career development as you're going through they're really like teaching you how to structure your resume how to actually do interviews and also how to build your portfolio from the projects that are being presented in class google also has the career hub that's um that gets unlocked after you complete all of the courses and get the certificate in which the 130 plus companies are able to hire directly from that pool of people ibm also does some of this like they kind of talk about uh some of the career related stuff like what kind of rules that you can expect after completing a certificate and also like what kind of things that data analysts can do to to like you know progress in their career but in comparison to google they really don't do as much another big difference is in terms of the tech stack that they teach so i'm just gonna pull up luke's nifty little chart that he made so thank you luke for that full credit to luke as expected google uses google products in terms of their tech stack and ibm tends to use ibm products google sheets versus ibm which uses ms excel and then for sql google uses bigquery which is their proprietary sql service versus ibm cloud so for sheets versus excel as well as bigquery versus ibm cloud i really don't think it makes that big of a difference like your google sheets excel similar enough and also for bigquery versus ibm cloud it's like a different infrastructure but it's still sql under the hood and really like in terms of sequel all flavors or sequel are pretty interchangeable it doesn't really matter that much but the next one i think does kind of matter which is google uses r in terms of programming language and ibm uses python and i it's also worth making you know that ibm spends a lot of time in python in fact majority of the courses are going to be in python google spends a lot of time on sql which i think is actually really great because a lot of your time as a data analyst is going to be spent using sql so in terms of the great python versus our debate i personally prefer python because i think it's a lot more readable and there's a lot more things that you can do in python it has better ml packages but there's nothing wrong with r as well um in industry people tend to use python more i find so in my eyes ibm gets a plus one there and then finally in terms of visualization google uses tableau and as a data analyst you probably see tableau being used in many places at least as opposed to cognos which is a proprietary visualization tool that's part of the ibm stack and it's not really used very often unless like you're working at a company that has really adopted ibm stack or you work at ibm all right so next comparison point is teaching style so ibm's teaching style is very like no-nonsense let's just jump straight into it kind of thing uh let me show you what i mean let's look at sql just because both of them go over sql and you kind of see the difference so you can see like here basic sql right it's like this is a sequel this is a database this is the select statement this is then you like you know hands-on lab practice selects name and they go like count distinct limit and then all these different ones like it's very like this is these are the things that we're gonna cover on the other hand if you look at google look at their sql course it's structured more like this is how we analyze data and then they start introducing tools like oh like using sorts and filters this is for spreadsheets and then for sql here it's like you can see that it's very it's more like introducing to you like this is how the process works and here are the tools that you can do so it's more like process first and then tool second another thing is if you actually go and look at the ibm course uh let's say look at like the select video for example you can see that here it's very like animation and slide based so it's like oh like retrieving rows from a table it's like a powerpoint slide essentially and it goes through everything and there's like animations as opposed to on the google side let me show you guys so the google slide it's much more like a talking head like there's someone who's going to be like walking you through it and it's a lot more like casual that's that's how i would say it it's like more like someone like talking to you directly as opposed to just like presenting it to you so ibm also tends to have like more text-based material um as you're going through them on google side it's pretty much all like video lectures it has like some readings here and there but the focus is on video if english isn't your predominant language or the language that you're going to be working with ibm certificate is pretty cool in the sense that it has different languages that you can actually change um and get different languages while for google you only get one language which is english so that's something to consider all right next comparison point is the capstone project so upfront both of these certificates are very applied like they have labs that are being incorporated into the material as well as different assessments throughout ibm also has a python project for data science which is one of their courses where you go through like a mini project and in this course you apply all the things that you learn in python into an actual project yeah crowdsourcing short squeeze dashboard so but it's about um the stock market and you build all the way up from the data set to a dashboard which is pretty cool it's like an end-to-end project back to the capstone comparison so for the ibm capstone project how it works is that everybody does the same project and you have the same data sets and data sources which you're supposed to piece together and go all the way from the beginning to a presentation with a dashboard it has some really good reviews in which people say it's actually really realistic um and you're actually solving like a real life problem now for google's data analytics capstone project i think this is the one that um really excites me you're completing a case study but unlike ibm the case study that you're doing doesn't have to be the same for everybody it's actually going to be like your unique project that you go from you know collected data sources and all the way up until doing a dashboard and doing a presentation and things like that unfortunately they haven't released it yet so i can't click through and really see exactly how it works but um i think it's really awesome because that means that you can actually work on something that you're really interested in and have something you need to put on your portfolio all right so after going through these two certificates in quite a lot of detail and comparing them on a lot of different aspects now it's time for my recommendation drum roll please i would go with the google one and let me tell you why the biggest reason is because of the career development that's being offered a lot of people have this misconception where if you learn something they just think like oh and then i can just like easily get a job in that field but in fact there's actually it's actually pretty difficult to get a job if you don't have any previous experience in the job that you're trying to get so the fact that google spends so much effort on career development the fact that they'd be hiring people who complete the certificate who don't have a background in data analytics and you have like 130 plus companies in the hub hiring directly from that pool as well i think it's it's a huge huge deal on ibm side um i think they did try like to make it really applicable but it just they just didn't really like go ham on it so my second one is in terms of teaching style as a working data scientist now what i realize is that it's really the process of problem solving the way of thinking that's a lot more important than going through just like tech stacking tools so ibm you know to their credit they do like teach how you know the tech stack works and how it kind of like fits into the whole picture but they still very much focus on the tools themselves as opposed to google they're much more focused on problem solving tools you can pick up pretty easily you know once you learn one of these tools one of these languages it's really not that hard to migrate to another one but it's the process that's really what differentiates a good data a good data analyst or data scientist and my third reason why i would choose the google data analytics certificate above the ibm one is because of the capstone project so ibm does the fact that ibm has a capstone project at all is already like amazing you know at 39 a month the fact that they even have that i think it's absolutely great and it's very real life but with that being said though like the google one is so it's so special because you can actually complete your case study on whatever it is that you are interested in and the project that you end up with is going to be unique so when you put that on your portfolio it wouldn't be like super generic for the ibm certificate people who complete that capstone they have like the same thing that's on their resume right so when they apply to different companies they probably already like a bunch of applicants are going to have that exact same capsule project so if you're more focused on changing your career where like you know doing something with your career after taking that certificate as opposed to just purely learning i think the google certificate would be more applicable to you if you're not us-based google did say that they'll be expanding potentially into other countries in terms of their career hub so that might also be an option for you so who would be good for the ibm certificate firstly it's people who don't use english as their primary language both at work or just like in general ibm has that option of not doing it in english so i think that's a huge bonus for you also if you're someone who already like knows a little bit about data analytics it actually might be better to go with the ibm one because then you know what it is that you need to know and what it is that you don't know because the ibm presents the information like so like you know clearly it's like we're into the select statement and then we're going to do like you know the limit statement and then the account and all these different things it's easier for you to actually like navigate to that section and learn the areas that you want as opposed to the google one where it's more like embedded into the entire process so it's harder to pick out like just the material that you want to learn without going through the entire process and a final reason which i think you should consider ibm over google is if you just don't like the style of teaching so teaching style matters a lot right like when you're actually going through it like you have to sit through so many hours of lectures if you just don't like the way that google presents the information like the very like talking ahead video based information very like more casual then i would say go with ibm if you like that butter with all that being said if you really just like cannot decide at all you're just like oh this is true or should i go with ibm and you just like don't know at all and like career isn't super important to you in terms of like changing your career um literally you can't really go wrong with either of them they both have really great reviews and really good readings as well and that's not like for no reason they really both are very comprehensive great programs so you really choosing either of them you can't go wrong and we're done i hope this video was helpful hope you guys enjoyed it and i'll see you guys next time