I am honestly a broken record when it comes to this program, but if you’re on the fence about this program, my opinion is to go for it now rather than later.

Here’s the midway point blog I posted a while ago on this subject, when I was in the trenches of learning.

I thought overall the experience was worth it. A lot of it was, as I said, a refresher for me, but the last two courses that dealt with presentation and visualization, and the programming language R, were both incredibly informative and touched on things I hadn’t considered. Though R showed me a lot of the cleaning and exploration in data that I knew of in Python, it was just good to see the language in action, and I fell in love with the reporting capability. Being able to turn your code into a pdf like that is revolutionary.

The presentation and visualization course was a lot more helpful for me than I was expecting. I’m always open to learning more about visualization: I feel like I only know so much and that there’s always more I can learn. I was right with this course, which goes a little bit into color theory to explain the reason a green and red diverging would be good and in what situations.

What surprised me more was that I had more to learn about presenting and sharing data. I have a passion for writing and for technical writing specifically, I’ve even worked towards getting certified, and thought that I’d have that part on lock.

This specific course helped break down the dos and don’ts of a presentation, of making the slides and what to put on them, what to include and how to talk about it, and the general order and what should be covered. Even my partner who’s been in Toastmaster’s for over 10 years was surprised when I mentioned that the end of the presentation should be finished off with recommendations for next steps. He had never heard that before, but he liked it. And I do too.

I do want to say that the program overall isn’t going to get deep or thorough. A lot of the point of this feels like getting you exposed to the ideas and the things you’ll encounter in a data analyst position, but it’s up to you to take what you learned and apply it to personal projects and anything else you can get your hands on. BigQuery has a whole bunch of public data that’s available to work with in SQL and you can download that data as well.

It’ll get you ready for what you’ll see in a position like that, but it won’t give you a thorough understanding of those tools.

However, there’s plenty else that you can get into to supplement this. Coursera has other Google courses that will help you create a specialization. Digital marketing and e-commerce, cybersecurity, advanced data analytics, and business intelligence, are the four that I’m currently looking into. I want some time to work on and finish up projects of mine, then put out another project roll call with some new things, then I’ll get back into it.

I’m also working on a DataCamp track for SQL data analysis at the moment, which I’m taking my time with, though I’m about halfway through.

I’m hoping to start working towards and associate’s in economics this fall and then transfer to finish off a bachelor’s in it. Again, probably will just take my time and chip away while I work, but it’s something I haven’t been able to get out of my head for the past year and I want to act on it.

Overall I think it was a great starting point for those who are interested in data analytics, and it was a great refresher course in the beginning for me, but it also held a lot of value in teaching me more about presentations and about the programming language R.

If you’re more of a Python person or that’s where you started, the Advanced Data Analytics program goes much deeper into that. The IBM data analyst cert also goes into Python.

Whatever certification you end up going with, if at all, I’m here in your cheering section! I hope you enjoy the process as much as I did.