Google Skillsboost is on fire!

I mean on fire, in a good way!

I have been a voracious consumer of Google Cloud on-demand training since 2017.?As an independent consultant, I had worked with on-premise database systems through 2016. At the end of one project and before starting the next, I decided to take the plunge and learn about cloud. I selected Google Cloud (DM me if you want to know why). I had a lot to learn in a short time and a limited budget, so the on-demand options looked good to me. At that time, Coursera looked good, I had used it for Machine Learning courses and healthcare informatics courses, and there was plenty of GCP content, so I threw myself into the deep end and started swimming. A couple of months later, I had earned my Google Professional Data Engineer certification and shortly after that I became a Google Authorized Trainer.

A lot has changed since then. Google has created several new Pro-level certifications, added dozens of new courses to their on-demand curriculum, and re-written many of the courses that I took in 2017. Google Cloud itself is constantly improving, so the courses are updated to reflect this.?Also, I worked in companies that used Pluralsight as their corporate provider of GCP training and I got some experience with that platform as well.

This year I began to use Google's own skillsboost learning platform. This is where the biggest changes in the on-demand training scene may be found.?In the past, Coursera and Pluralsight provided Google training content, as videos and supporting documents on their own LMS sites, and labs were performed on Qwiklabs, a separate web site. Qwiklabs was previously an independent company that provided training lab environments for AWS and Google Cloud.?Google liked the company so much that they bought it.?Qwiklabs in itself is wonderful, because each lab environment is spun up on-demand with a unique student id, pre-provisioned with quotas and resources needed for that lab, and with a timer set.?After the lab steps are completed, the lab environment is torn down and Qwiklabs handles all of the cleanup. It's a perfect use case for cloud computing, a bursty, on-demand workload satisfied by ephemeral resources that are patched and maintained by the provider. All provided for a low, pay-per-lab fee, or in the case of Coursera and Pluralsight, the costs are bundled together with the service's subscription fee.

All of this worked really well, with either Coursera or Pluralsight tracking progress through the many courses (I often has several tracks in flight simultaneously, as would be the case for most Google Trainers), managing certificates for complete courses, recommending next courses etc.?The integration with Qwiklabs is seamless, but it remained a separate web site.

In the past year, after I started using skillsboost a lot, I found that it is, by far, the superior platform for GCP on-demand training. Several factors go into my rating; 1) ease of navigating to the content that I want?2) thoroughness of offerings?3) timeliness of offerings

The first big issue is navigating to the desired content. Both Pluralsight and Coursera have content related to several cloud providers, and have both official curriculum from the cloud providers as well as 3rd party courses written by other trainers, and offer mutliple versions of each course in various languages. Beyond this, the Google Cloud courses are grouped, often according to certification training path. On Coursera, these are called Specializations and on Pluralsight these are called Paths, and there are also channels that can be used to define custom groupings.

The sheer volume of stuff makes it hard to find what I need. I'm a bulk consumer of Google training. A typical user might use a rifle-shot query to zero on a course or a course group to satisfy an immediate need.

I want to ask a query like this:?Show me all of the courses that related to Google Cloud technology, that are authored by "Google Cloud", that are presented in English, show me both individual course titles and groupings per certification, show me all versions of courses that have been updated, but order them so that the updates are obvious, and show me a flag to indicate which courses I have already completed.?And, let me download he query results to a spreadsheet.

Neither Coursera nor Pluralsight come anywhere close to letting me answer this query. Skillsboost does not let me run this query either, but it's much less of a problem there because the site contains only Google-cloud-authored materials, and there are mutliple views that show me the groupings of courses into Learning Paths, and another UI that shows me my completion status for the various paths that I'm presently working on. So, skillsboost is by far the leader here.

The thoroughness of offering is another major advantage of skillsboost. Take the PCA (Professional Cloud Architect) learning path as an example. This learning path has 7 courses now, and you'll find those 7 courses on Pluralsight and Coursera as well. But in addition, skillsboost has 7 more quests, each containing 5-8 labs each, typically culminating in a very difficult Challenge lab. These are not to be found within the other platforms. In theory, they could be sought out individually on Qwiklabs, if you knew what to look for, and created a separate Qwiklabs account. In addition to the Quests, there's another course called "Preparing for your Professional Cloud Architect Journey" This really provides orientation for what you need to do when going through all of the other materials, and via a series of "Diagnostic Questions" identifies in great detail where the knowledge gaps are.?(These diagnostic questions seem to me to be about as difficult as questions on the certification exams, ie quite difficult, if you have not studied.)

To sum up the thoroughness point, skillsboost has all of the same content that the other platforms have, but then wraps the main offerings with an additional "Preparing for ..." course, and then adds to that an extensive well-curate list of labs to provide additional experience in certain areas. And, if you can do the Challenge lab in one go on the first try, then my hat's off to you.

Let's discuss the 3rd point now: timeliness. This comes up in two ways. When courses are revised, new versions seem to be released first on skillsboost, and then with some delay on Coursera and Pluralsight. Some weeks ago, I took a course in the PCNE (networking) path on Pluralsight. After I completed the course (and only after), I was notified that a new version of the course was already on the platform, and I could take that, if I were to step up from my regular subscription to the Premium subscription. I found this unacceptable. It would have been marginally acceptable, had the offer been made before I started the course, but having spent 20 hours taking the old version of the course, I was not about to re-take the newer version of the same course. That's when I moved over to skillsboost.

Another way in which skillsboost is more timely is when entirely new learning paths are released. The new Generative AI learning path is a great example here. The learning path was created with 7 courses a few weeks ago. Within the past few days, 2 more courses were added to the learning path. I expect to see more there soon.?As of this writing, I see one course of this learning path on Coursera (may or may not be the same version) and I don't see any at all on Pluralsight. I assume that these platforms will get this new content soon, and I don't know if the delay is caused by Google's release policy, or some factor at the platform provider end. But, in a hot area like Gen AI, the several-weeks difference in content availabity is huge.?

In conclusion, I'm delighted with the focused subject area of skillsboost, the thoroughness of the content, and the speed with which content is updated. The integration with Qwiklabs is seamless, as always, and the Qwiklabs platform itself is rock-solid. Coursera and Pluralsight are wonderful platforms if they are provided by the company that you work for, or if you want a rich trove of other content, such as AWS, Azure, python, Tensorflow, git, and all the rest. I'll continue to use them for these purposes, but for GCP training, I will only use skillsboost from now on.

That brings us to the question of cost. For individuals, separate Qwiklabs tokens may still be purchased, but most people will want a monthly subscription ($29 / month) or an annual plan ($299 / year). The annual plan, called Innovator's Plus, includes $500 to $1000 of Google Cloud credits, a voucher for a certification exam, and other benefits, and is an incredibly good deal. https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/subscriptions?Get in touch with your local Google Developer Group (https://developers.google.com/community/gdg) to get advice on other options, some of which may be free for a limited time period.

#googlecloud #cloudtraining #skillsboost #qwiklabs?#pca #pcmle #pcdbe