[Music] foreign over a year ago I took the Google data analytics professional certification I remember at the time I debated a lot if it was worth taking how beneficial this would be for me and if this would lead to a job offer in the future so I decided to make this video to answer all these questions for those of you who are also considering this specific certification so I wanted to start off by answering the most frequent question I get is this certification able to replace my degree in my personal opinion this specific certification alone will not be able to replace your four-year degree or diploma however this specific certification definitely did help me land several job offers and I talk more about this at the end of the video I do think this is a good stepping stone for those of you looking to enter the field of data or explore the field of data in addition to that since it was curated by Google this will definitely be a good conversation starter in your interviews and also I'll be very eye-catching to see on your resume now the estimated duration of this course is said to be six months however it took me less than a month to complete the whole course this is because I decided to spend about eight hours a day every day for about a month to complete this course so please take that into account I personally had some free time between semesters so I decided to take this course as soon as possible and complete it as fast as possible so that I can move on to the next stage of my data Journey the current cost of the certification is 49 a month this is the standard corsida plus fee so if you're taking this course and you want to take advantage of that fee you can take other courses at the same time so if you want to maximize your output with this specific payment go ahead feel free I personally took just one course and decided to pay that 49 again to take other courses in the future I think spending that 49 is justifiable and if you believe you can finish this course in a week where Syria offers a seven day free trial so you could actually finish that in a week for free when it comes to skills and tools that you'll use you'll be using Google Sheets bigquery Tableau and R to be fair I am a big fan of the coverage of the specific certification however my big critique is that I wish they chose python instead of R for their programming language of choice I'll talk about that more later you'll also learn a lot of data analysis skills such as data cleaning mining aggregation and visualization analysis each course has assessments quizzes and Labs that help you understand and practice each skill better the nice thing about this is that if you are familiar with that specific topic for example Google Sheets or SQL you can go ahead and take the quiz at the end of each course to skip that course or bypass that specific course they teach the skills using their suggested data analysis workflow which is their ask prepare and process analyze share and act workflow I talk about this more in my other video I'll leave a link below the like button if you guys want to check that out I believe the biggest benefit of this course is the case study at the end for many of you who are just entering this field this is an amazing opportunity for you to experience real world work and get your hands dirty with real world data there are two options in terms of case studies and you're not required to complete either one to get their certification however I do recommend you try at least one so that this can be put on your resume or your portfolio later on this is one of the main reasons why I got my internships I talk about it more in my other videos so feel free to check it out like I said before I personally did both case studies because I want to leverage the specific capsule project as much as I could and it inspired me to do more projects overall now let's go into the flaws of this course the biggest flaw like I said before is it chooses R over python I'm a strong python Advocate because I believe it's such a versatile and flexible language I personally use Python for software engineering for web development and for data science data analytics too so it's a very versatile language and you can pivot python into any other field if you want to I think it's a solid first language because it's very easy to learn and it's consistently being developed and used in the real world for complex practices like machine learning and web development so yeah that's one of the biggest downfalls for this specific certification however Google recently released an advanced data analytics professional certification which uses python as their main language so I feel like that might be a good alternative the other problem I have with this specific certification is that it's very generalized my expectations for this course were too drastic and I quickly realized this after securing my first internship there were a lot of skills I had to pick up myself and weren't covered by the certification which is completely fine I just set my expectations too high so I want to clear that out for everyone whose expectations are too high for the certification it is a beginner entry level certification but I think it's fair to say that the certification will give you all the skills you need to start as an entry-level data analyst and you can export from there me myself I had some background with r and Excel so I found some information within the course to be redundant and repetitive I also think this certification can be misleading a lot of people tend to think that the certification alone will get you a job and that is definitely not true it for sure helps but you still need to do the bulk of the heavy lifting I Leverage The certification by displaying it on my LinkedIn profile my handshake profile my resume and my website I believe the word Google on my resume and my profiles definitely helped catch the eyes of some employers or recruiters to get me some interviews and it was definitely a good topic to talk about during my interviews it would help verify the skills I had on my web portfolio my resume I also feature all the projects and case studies I did for the certification on my web portfolio this definitely helped inspire me to build and expand my portfolio even more within the certification there are also resume and interview tips which I thought was pretty useful in fact I talked about it in some of my other videos so feel free to check that out I'll leave a playlist linked down below the last benefit I see from the certification is the network it comes with Google claims that you're able to connect with over 150 companies that recognize the certification which definitely can be useful however I think it's important to note that these opportunities are strictly for people in the US so for those of you who are international this might not be that valuable to you overall I think the certification is worth the money if you have the money to spare and if you want the additional perks that comes with the name Google but if you can't afford it there are many free alternatives for those of you who are opting for the free route I have a list of YouTubers and courses down below that I recommend they're all free and they will definitely help you in your data Journey this course alone definitely does not give you all the tools of the trade but it does give you enough information and knowledge to navigate the field yourself if you want to dive deeper in the field of data science I personally recommend checking out the IBM data science professional certification that's on Coursera I'll definitely talk more about the certification in a different video there's also another certification that Google released the advanced data analytics professional certification I haven't completed the certification yet so I'll definitely make a video after completing this to give you guys feedback and my input on this certification anyway that's all I have for now if you guys have any questions feel free to leave a comment down below thank you guys for watching and I'll see you in the next one