Certifications | IBM Data Science Practitioner Course | Review

This week, I’m reviewing the Data Science Practitioner certificate. It was offered by my university at a student discount, so I decided to try it out. Here’s what I thought about the program.

Note: It is different from the IBM Data Science Professional Course that I see a lot more around the internet. This is an in-person program offered by an IBM certified professional (in my case, it was delivered by a lecturer from my university).

Price

I have to admit, price-wise, I think it is a terrible deal. The whole program (in my case) was run over 5 days (3 Saturdays and 2 Sundays) from 10am to 5pm (with breaks and lunch in between). The intention is for it to be 35 hours of instruction. The whole program was offered to the public at AED4,868 (around 1,325USD at time of writing) and to alumni / students at a 50% discount (not including tax) at AED2,748.90 (around 748USD at time of writing).

The few considerations that will have to be taken on top of the course: snacks and drinks were provided (cookies, small pastries, coffee, juice) and access to the IBM Cloud - which you can retain after you complete the course.

Who Is it For

It is marketed for the general public - meaning there aren’t any prerequisites for joining this short course, and I will agree. The floor for joining is very low. Lessons are very simple, easy to follow, and most things are easy to learn. What I will say is that you already have Data Science Experience or technical knowledge, I would highly recommend you avoid this course - especially if it is offered to the general public. A lot of time will be allocated towards dealing with technical difficulties, making it a bit not worth your money (USD750 is pretty steep all things considered).

What it Covers

I would say that this is actually pretty good if you don’t have much of a technical base at all - the reason being that this is a very simplistic course that goes into more of the theory of Data Science - why we use it, principles, the process. If I were to be frank, very little time is used actually working on projects.

A LOT of the time is allocated towards the lectures - 8 lectures in total, that take quite a while.

Ultimately, my advice pertaining to this program is, if you’re going to do it, do it in person. If you’re not doing it in person, it’s just so much better to do the program on Coursera. You can do it much more at your own pace, and you probably gain more out of it at the end of the day.

And when you perform the projects, this is a short summary of what you do in the labs.

Lab 1: Making an IBM Cloud account and removing a few columns in basically an Excel file
Lab 2: Create a new column from two dates (use one date to substract another date) and run the job, create output.
Lab 3: Use Watson Studio to create graphs of the data
Lab 4: Copy and paste exercise with Jupyter notebook - strictly, it’s very hard to walk out of this exercise with much meaningful skills that you will use in the future if you’re non-technical.
Lab 5: Use auto-AI to find the patterns in the data. This is pretty cool, but strictly speaking, you don’t need to be here for 5 days to learn how to do this.

We also had to do a module by ourselves at home, the IBM Enterprise Design Thinking module online - watch a couple of videos, do a couple exercises and you get a badge. So I got two badges in this course: the IBM Data Science Practitioner badge and the IBM Enterprise Design Thinking badge.

Then, there is a project at the end where you work in a group to implement what you learnt in a) visualizing the data and b) finding trends in the data - and which inputs are the most important at determining the output.

Finally, there is a final exam where you have to score 70%.

Assessment

The assessment is actually pretty tricky. A lot of them will be similar to the quizes offered in the online course, but I don’t believe everything is there. It is a mix of multiple questions and questions where you have to select multiple boxes as part of the answer.

The questions are similar (but not entirely covered) in this quizlet.

The Short Review

A lot of theory, very little practical knowledge gained from this. You get two badges (Data Science Practitioner and Enterprise Design Thinking) that somewhat add value to your CV, but the price is really steep, all things considered. Don’t expect to be a data science pro after this program, but I think autoAI is a pretty cool tool that you can use (to a certain degree - because your account doesn’t have that much data you can use) in other aspects.

Don’t do this course via Zoom, there are much better IBM courses that you can do online. A lot of the value is the networking - because I don’t think that the skills alone are worth the USD750.