IBM Data Science Professional Certificate worth it ?
By: Diogo Silva
Tags: IBM, Data Science, Technology, Coursera, Review

In this small article, I’ll share with you my experience about the certificate on Coursera. As you know, there is a lot of content available online in the area of Data Science where some of are free or paid.

This certificate is one of the paid ones, where you can find the course on:

The Price

This is one of the key points that I think is more important, for this simply reason - there are people that can’t afford a course that probably has the best content, but on the other hand, it costs a lot of money.

This course on Coursera costs you €32 per month, when comparing with the other courses, I think this price is pretty acceptable.

The payment is like a subscription on Netflix, it means that you can cancel at any time without loosing any of the work you have done before.

You can request a financial help to the Coursera which takes you 15 days to receive an answer from them

The Course is self-paced, it means you can ignore the dates that Coursera gives you. They are estimates, you can easily do 1 or 2 weeks of the course in a few hours.

The faster you do the courses, of course, the less you pay. If you are a student or have free time, I recommend doing 1 or 2 courses per week, challenging but doable. Otherwise, do the best thing for you.

Course Structure

When I started attending the course on Coursera (Aug 2020), the course was constituted by 9 courses, now the course as 10 courses.

The new version includes the Course Python Project for Data Science where you learn how to Web Scrapping information from a webpage or API with Beautiful Soup or pandas.

The 10 Courses are:

The Content

On Coursera they indicate this course is beginner level. In my opinion, I think this course is something like “advanced” beginner level because sometimes the code is a little complex for those who are learning how to code for the first time or even for those who are already familiar with it.

Note: In the Course Python for Data Science, AI & Development they teach you the basics of the Python language. I recommend, before attending this course, watch some tutorials, for instance, on YouTube.

In the Course they also teach you the basics of SQL, not covering other concepts as Stored Procedures, Functions, Indexes, etc.

You will learn how to use “classic” Data Science libraries like:

You will also learn how some Machine Learning algorithms work as well what are the phases of Machine Learning project:

Business Requirements

Exploratory analysis

Preprocessing and Data cleaning

Feature engineering

Feature selection

Model selection

Hyper parameter tuning

Model evaluation

Evaluation and Methodology

In the course there are two types of evaluations:

Multiple choice assessments — where you need, for instance, 60% or 80% to pass

Projects — where you submit your code and another student evaluates you

When you submit the project, you have to evaluate other student’s work, the community follows a fair evaluation where every student has to be critical and fair with another student’s work.

The course has very well explained hands-on labs for you to practice and test the code to you to see how the things work.

You have two ways to do the labs:

Locally

Cloud

The projects and labs can be done on Watson Studio, where you don’t need to install anything, or you can always install Anaconda and to the labs or projects locally.

I recommend both of the two worlds, try to do some labs locally on Watson Studio which is really cool, others in the Cloud for you to get familiar with both.

If you have any problems with configurations or the code itself, you have a discussion forum where you can find a lot of help. I had a bug in the code in one of the projects where I couldn’t find the answer, for instance, on Stack Overflow, after 1 or 2 hours I decided to check on the forum if someone had the same error and there’s the answer. I strongly recommend search or post your error / questions on the discussion forum, the community is active, and the students usually help each other.

Conclusion

I recommend this course for who already know or want to get into Data Science world. The videos are not so long, the instructors explain well how things work and the essentials of the matters. You always have the help of the community if you need something and remember if you need financial support, it takes 15 days to Coursera gives you an answer.

Thanks for reading and happy coding !