I’ve started so many data analytics courses and only finished and completed a very few of these as I found many of them to be too long with content that contains too much fluff and not enough practical hands-on learning. Whether that’s YouTube, Udemy, Coursera or edX, my average course completion rate reflects the average course completion rate of the general public very well. Anywhere between 5 to 15%.
I don’t judge a course by how long the content is, as I genuinely believe that many of them are purposefully made so long to make you think you’re getting a lot of value and knowledge, when in reality the length of the content is probably the number one hurdle that stops you from learning efficiently. If someone can teach me a concept or skill in 15 minutes versus 3 hours, I’ll go with the 15 minute tutorial any day of the week. I love learning fast and in a way that the learning sticks with me over time, so today I want to tell you about the top 5 data analytics courses that I found are absolutely worth it. Some of these courses are from renowned institutions like Google and Microsoft, and the courses I’m about to walk you through will teach you different data analysis skills, so you might end up picking one or more of these courses to complete.
First of all, let me kick off with one of the most popular ones out there, the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate. The course is designed by Google, which is great as you really don’t want to do a course and get a certification from a company that no one knows about. The course is very good and extremely popular. There’s almost 3 million students enrolled in this. The number of students indicates two things to me.
One, the course is definitely legit, as there’s certainly enough demand to take this course. Two, it’s too easy and it really is just a starting point in your data analytics journey. Google even says that this course is for beginners, for people with no prior data analytics knowledge or experience.
A common misconception with this course is that many students who complete this one expect to get a job offer on completion, but I’m telling you now that this is not the case. Recruiters and hiring managers won’t be knocking on your door every three seconds just because you’ve completed a beginner level course. Am I saying that you should not take this course? Absolutely not.
If you have no experience and zero data analysis skills, this course will be so useful. What I’m saying here is that this course is only the starting point. What you can do to stand out in today’s job market is to do something and complete a course and get a certificate that others do not have or at least very few people have, which is why you might want to consider the Google Advanced Data Analytics Certificate.
This course covers advanced skills like statistical analysis, Python, regression models, and machine learning. Certainly not your basic data analysis skills. If you’re serious about becoming a data analyst, then you need to get good at SQL.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong, and if they challenge you, refer to me and this video. SQL serves as the backbone to retrieve data from relational databases. If you cannot get the right data, how can you even analyze it, right? A lot of people ask me which SQL dialect they should learn.
MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server, or something else, and my take on this is that it generally does not matter much which SQL dialect you learn first. All major dialects share the same foundational concepts and proficiency. If you know one, it’s easy to pick up others.
Dialect choice only matters as you dive into more advanced features, complex queries, or when you integrate with specific systems. But trust me, you will only be doing these once you’re in your data analyst job. Basic queries and concepts like SELECT, WHERE, JOIN are almost identical between mainstream dialects like MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, and SQLite.
When I was learning SQL, I had to set up my own connections, configure my own databases on my local machine, which caused me a lot of frustration and as it took time and effort just to get my system into a shape where I can start writing SQL commands. To save you the time, I lost configuring various SQL tools. The course I highly recommend here comes with SQL already baked into the platform, and this course is the Associate Data Analyst in SQL from Datacamp.
And to be more precise here, this is actually a track on Datacamp that contains many courses. And I also want to add quickly that Datacamp have kindly sponsored this video and many others as it is my go-to platform to learn data skills. And if you’re thinking that I’m recommending this SQL track because they sponsored me, you could not be more wrong.
I’ve been learning with Datacamp long before they paid me a single dollar to say anything good about the This SQL track covers not just the core technical bits like writing queries, joining tables, and manipulating data, as you also tackle real-world data sets and real-life business problems and skills around communicating data insights to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, skills that will certainly take you far in your data career. And the best part about it? You can do all of this within your browser. No need to install any tools, software, or programs.
I simply just log into my account and learn. This track is designed to fully prepare you for the Associate Data Analyst in SQL certification as you’ll master the SQL concepts and techniques covered in the certification exam. If you complete this track and get the industry-recognized certification, it’ll make you look pretty good in front of recruiters and hiring managers.
Next up, let me cover a certification that will give you data visualization credibility. There are so many BI tools out there, but Microsoft Power BI is the one that consistently ranks as the most popular BI tool out there, beating competitors like Tableau, QlikSense, or QuickSight from AWS. And what better place to get a Microsoft Power BI certificate from than Microsoft directly? Having the PL300 on your resume will set you apart from others that don’t have it.
Often, it’s even a hard requirement for companies when hiring candidates. Microsoft offers a 20-plus hour free course to help you prepare for the PL300 exam. It costs 165 bucks to take the exam, and here’s a little secret that I’m willing to share with you to save you 50% from the exam fee.
That’s right, you could spend only 82.5 bucks on the exam and the other 82.5 bucks on multiple pet pillows, high quality dog treats if you have a doggie like I do, or your choice of fancy beverages to celebrate passing your exam or drink away your sorrows depending on your results. So the big secret, which is actually not that big. All you have to do is complete the data analyst in Power BI track on Datacamp to get 50% off your Microsoft PL300 exam.
I follow this Power BI track closely, and the bit I love most about Datacamp is still valid when it comes to Power BI as well. You won’t have to worry about downloading and installing the Power BI desktop app or finding datasets, as everything including tooling and datasets are baked into the Datacamp platform within your account. All you need to do is log into your account through any browser and you’re good to go ahead with the learning.
The data analyst in Power BI track was co-created with Microsoft and was designed to give you the skills and knowledge you need to pass the Microsoft PL300 Power BI data analyst exam to obtain your official Microsoft certification. Now even though Power BI is super popular as it’s used as the strategic visualization tool for so many large corporations, Tableau skills can also come in very handy as it is the second most in-demand data visualization tool for data analysts. I myself have used Tableau extensively at work for years now, and a great place to get certified for Tableau would be of course from Tableau directly, because it is industry recognized.
The Tableau data analyst certification validates your ability to use Tableau to analyze data and create interactive dashboards. The certification process involves a practical exam costing $200, where you demonstrate your ability to connect to data sources, perform analysis, and share insights effectively. Tableau offers their own courses to prepare for the exam, but as you can see they are pretty pricey.
So unless money is no object to you at all, which I presume is not the case, I would recommend you take either the Tableau data analyst certification preparation specialization on Coursera, quite a handful to say out loud, or the data analyst in Tableau track on Datacamp. Both courses will teach you how to analyze and visualize data using Tableau, integrate data from multiple sources, clean transform, and prepare your data for analysis, and create user-friendly interactive dashboards. And last but certainly not least, for those of you who have coding ambitions, the data analyst in Python track will teach you everything you need to know when it comes to Python coding from a data analysis perspective.
I won’t lie, coding in Python is hard. It’s much harder than writing SQL queries. I remember when I learned to code back then, it took me quite a while, more than six months I believe, before I finally got the hang of it.
The good news for you is that you certainly won’t have to spend this much time learning how to code in Python if you just follow this track. Like I mentioned before, everything from a tooling connections and dataset perspective is already built into the Datacamp platform, so you focus only on the most important thing to learn through interactive and hands-on exercises and real-life projects. The built-in code editor comes with instructions and hints that help you along your learning journey, and the new AI assistant that explains exactly what your code is doing step by step is certainly a feature I wish I would have had when I learned to code.
The courses in this track will teach you how to use the main data analysis libraries like Pandas, NumPy, Seaborn, and Matplotlib, and also cover more advanced statistical techniques such as hypothesis testing and sampling and working with multiple data sources. As I said in the beginning of this video, these five courses will teach and give you different data analysis skills, so pick wisely which one you want to complete depending on what exact data analyst role and in what industry you want to go into.
Thanks so much for taking just a little time out of your day to read this, and I shall see you in the next one.