Is it worth it to pay 3–4 lakhs for Data Science Certification Course for Working Professionals
What Matters The Most?
Certification or Project Experience- A Guide to Speed Up Career Growth
Certification programs have become the biggest craze of the 2021 youth professionals. Especially since February 2020, while COVID 19 pandemic sent the entire world to lockdown, the demands of online certification courses have reached an impressive peak.
Everyone is now sharing their pride in completing several certifications on professional social media like LinkedIn. Yes, they have utilized work from home and unskilled themselves but do it such certificate worth!!!
What benefits does a certification course offer?
Certification courses offer theoretical learning scopes and upgrade your knowledge base in terms of the conceptual world. It offers several degrees that help to enrich your CVs. You get extensive opportunities to become a knowledgeable candidate in the job market. While some of the certification courses offer practical examinations and projects, most certification measures remain limited to the boundaries of conceptual knowledge up-gradation.
What benefits does a Project Experience offer?
Project experiences offer the opportunities of upskilling yourself from real-time project experience. The simplest example is the internship.
The key benefits of project management are that you will earn some hands-on experience in your domain that will help you to perform better in your workplace. We get a better chance to become well-versed in time management, people management, risk-managed, and yes, blunder management.
Everyone makes mistakes. It’s natural. While you are doing a project, there will happen blunders during the ongoing process. No matter whoever made that blunder, what matters to the career is how someone is managing that blunder. From project experience, you can gain better confidence in blunder management.
Certification versus Project Experience
Click Here & Listen Carefully to Industry Experts..
Here let me ask you a simple question.
What is more important in terms of career growth? Certification or Experience?
If your answer is certification and you are giving this answer from your self-realization, you must be a fresher or at the entry-level of your career.
Yes, while you will start your career, then what matters the most is your degrees and certifications. At this stage, the talent acquisition team of a company does not find must materials to analyze in your CV. Then specialization of certificate and even obtained marks become a parameter.
Now come to the second option. Those who opted for ‘experience’ as the answer to the above question is belong to a well-experienced professional community.
Yes, it’s a hard truth, your certifications have a price for today, but the same will become completely priceless tomorrow.
Doing certification offers your benefits at the early stage of your career, but once you start your career, what matters only is your experience.
Talent acquisition teams of the MNCs look for competent candidates, not for knowledgeable ones.
When selecting candidates, HR professionals and the talent acquisition team prefer the candidate with a greater degree of project experience over the candidates’ more significant degrees and certificates.
Here the logic is elementary. When you have already had significant years of work experience, you will apply to a new position for a salary hike. If you think from the company’s perspective, what will you expect from the candidate? Of course, a greater degree of expertise results in team management, risk management, blunder management, etc. Any effective management needs live experience. Because management or working on a team is not like solving mathematical problems, the solution is more dependent on the situation, time, and human psychology.
If you are offering only conceptual and theory-based knowledge to a company, why will they hire you with a comprehensive salary package? Instead, they can get that from a fresher candidate with similar certification at a relatively lower salary package.
Hence, to demand and crack a fair amount of hike, you need to offer a company with unique and expertise skills that make you far more competent than a fresher candidate.
Besides, running behind the certification is a complete loss once you have already started your career. Because the return on investment almost becomes zero at this stage. Instead, enrolling for an internship seems more beneficial. You can earn some monetary amount from the training, and at the same time, you gather field experience that will help you in your next job search. Even if you are attending any non-paid internship still, the time you invest in that project will be a measure for your next job’s salary calculation.
The field of data science- A real-world experience that proves project experience wins over the certifications
‘Data science career transition’ is in high demand. As this field has no domain limitation and offers ample scopes to all irrespective of their specialization, hence everyone is getting passionate about becoming a data scientist.
While two to three years back, so many people successfully transacted their career into the data science world, but now the completion has become very tough.
Candidates invest lakhs on fees to earn certification and a diploma in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Still, while it comes to return on investment, they are not getting their expected job.
But employees with no such certifications are moving toward the data science-related project very quickly.
Why are candidates not getting an appropriate job even after doing Data Science/ ML/ AI certification?
Again the answer is experience. While you are opting for a career transaction, then for sure, you will not start from the very beginning; somewhat, you will only change the direction of your career upward for the same professional level at which you presently exist. So you need an ample amount of experience to impress the talent acquisition team of your target company. For knowledge, the company can do a better deal with a fresher.
Nowadays, tons of online and offline certification courses and post-graduation are available on Data Science/ ML/ AI. But amongst them, only those courses worth that comes with a bunch of live projects.
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This is why even after offering no degrees or certification, candidates completing Bootcamp courses get placed in MNCs with lucrative salaries with three months of their course completion. On the other hand, even after earning Master degrees in Data science from institutional courses, candidates find jobs searching a matter of hurdle.
Even institutes and universities that offer such data science courses have already started chaining their business strategies. Despite tying up with the companies’ HR department, they are showing more interest in taking up their data science project to train their candidates with the real-time project.
So, it’s your turn to decide whether to invest with zero ROI or invest for a lucrative ROI.
Skillslash is an organization that pioneered Full Stack AI and ML program with an internship in startups for fresher, professional, and programmers.
Are you still confused about the impact of certification programs in AI and ML to transition into a data science role ?
Does it make sense to spend your time and money exploring certification programs
OR
Should I focus on learning and strive to gain relevant project experience to crack my next data science interview?
Hear what our experts have to say about this !!
