For a young Data science ,do You Recommend Certifications or Projects?

Response 1:

Suraj Shukla

Data Scientist @ CIMB Lab

Certifications were important about ten years ago when you show

certificates to impress hiring managers with how much you have

learned. But nowadays certificates are irrelevant. Many platforms

have made it much easier to earn certificates and anyone can earn

several certifications without even completing the course or

understanding what is taught in the course. Employers and hiring

managers know this because they also passed through the same

system so they are very much aware of it. In my company, for

instance, we never ask for your certificates when we are hiring. We

don’t look at it. We prefer you show us your portfolio and be ready to

explain in detail every bit of the projects included in your portfolio.

So instead of going for certifications, participate in Kaggle,

Hackathons, personal projects, company internships, and things like

that. Add those projects to your Github account.

Response 2

Kanav Anand

Data Scientist @ American ExpressIf I am recruiting a Data Scientist or even for any other position, I

will rather prefer someone who has some live projects in his/her

portfolio. That gives me a sense of knowledge of the person in front

of me, rather than looking at the certificates the person is having.

Even if the person is holding a certificate from Harvard or MIT, and

someone else has done some cool project, I will still prefer the person

who is having projects. Anyone can get certificates but few people

understand what is taught in the course. Besides, some courses are

just superficial with all the answers to their questions available on the

internet and they do not teach you in detail for you to understand

what you are supposed to know at the end of the course. I have even

seen business analysts with Data Science certificates, could you

imagine that? It is just the same as during our engineering degree

where we study about 32 subjects but with no expertise in any of

them, yet we graduate and have our certificate and when you get to

the real world job environment, everything starts to scream at you. I

will very much say that go for hands-on projects and hackathons

rather than certificates.

Happy coding !