Data Analyst: Certificate/Masters vs. Bootcamp

October 31, 2019 8:36 AM

Have you done one or the other? Tell me what it was like and what you wish you'd done/regret/are so happy you did, please! Trying to make my final decision.

I've narrowed down what I want to do to transition from a career that's been all over the place to firmly in data analysis and prediction where my talents and interest is.

Option 1: a certificate in Business Analytics from my alma-mater that has a satellite school in my city. This is 5 courses that can feed directly into a Masters (which is another 5-6 courses). Cost is ~$1,995 per class. Sounds like it would take 1-2 years depending on if I do the masters.

Will this help me get a job while in the program? I don't see growth at my current company and as you can see from previous asks, it's not a great place. Staying for another year is possible but … bleh. Would a few classes or the certificate help me get a job quickly?

Option 2: attend a 12-week bootcamp in Chicago. Cost $17,000 + living expenses, requires quitting my job and taking out big loans. The program I think is best is called Metis.

Have you done this for this industry or any others? This is particularly attractive but also incredibly scary to contemplate. I would be quitting my job, worried about the world/economy eventually blowing up, leaving my partner for a few months... basically, it's insanely terrifying.

So I'm leaning toward the Certificate, I guess. The thing is, I know I'm really talented at this... I just... am so scared.

posted by OnTheLastCastle to Education (10 answers total)

I did a certificate of Data Science (at a satellite of my alma mater in fact) and had no trouble getting interviews. However, I was in the Silicon Valley and brought 30 years of computer programming experience with me.

If you don’t have that much experience, and definitely if you’re not in a place with an abundance of jobs, I would suggest you get the Masters.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:45 AM on October 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I'm finding self-direction REALLY hard. I have ADHD and the giant motivation part is what most affects me. I thrive under pressure (reasonable), expectations and accountability. I do not thrive when that's all internal to me.

Under pressure, I created a data department and learned a boatload of things. Without pressure, I've floundered motivating to really dig into learning Python even though I enjoy it.

This is just something about myself that I can manage but is definitely a part of me. So "just make a big portfolio of projects" is... my mind goes completely blank. One aspect of ADHD is that internal motivation can be extremely low. I'm not lazy or stupid, it's … well, it's a thing just believe me.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 8:55 AM on October 31, 2019

Would looking at a specific data platform, eg Salesforce, Tableau etc be an option? The Masters seems like a nice long term plan, but if you can gain enough skills to be employed in the area first and then take the Masters (as it seems to help promotion over field entry in most areas).
posted by typecloud at 9:23 AM on October 31, 2019

What area of data analytics do you want to focus on? Business Intelligence? Machine learning? Data engineering? What was your bachelors?

I ask because there are several routes you can take that a regular boot camp may not prepare you for in terms of focus and therefore an employer won’t know what to do with you. I would figure that out first and then maybe look into WGU’s masters in data analytics. It’s cheaper than all other options, is competency based, and the school has a good reputation.
posted by Young Kullervo at 9:42 AM on October 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

Also I recently dropped out of an online program at a traditional uni because it was awful, poorly taught and poorly paced. I wish I had enrolled in a program like the one I mentioned at WGU but it wasn’t available at the time.
posted by Young Kullervo at 9:45 AM on October 31, 2019

Best answer: Speaking as someone who works at a Fortune 500, a lot of big companies are retraining/upskilling their current employees in data analytics through mentoring, online study and partnerships with local universities. I know people whose main job is now data analytics but who as recently as one year ago were working in operations, communications, project management, HR and engineering. One big reason for this in-house training is speed/cost - it's simply quicker to retrain current employees and another is information security. A more cost effective option might be to find a job at a large and/or quickly growing company and make your interest in developing data analysis skills explicit in the interview. You would likely hear if that's a field in which they are expanding and what sort of in-house training they are offering. I'm setting myself up to move into a hybrid communications/data analysis role over the next year through in-house training and coursework.
posted by caveatz at 1:14 PM on October 31, 2019 [3 favorites]

I'm not familiar with data analysis bootcamps.

In programming, there is a glut of coding bootcamps churning out people who know a language and can type lines in that language, and nothing else. Vital theoretical knowledge like how to design legible maintainable code, how to pick which methods & algorithms to use, professional standards. These all get tossed out because of time constraints. Bootcamps can be a good way to gain a skill if you already have the theoretical background, but they aren't going to replace an actual program.

In your shoes, I decided to get my masters.
posted by Ahniya at 6:07 PM on October 31, 2019

Under pressure, I created a data department and learned a boatload of things.

This is likely more than enough to get you an entry level data analyst or business analyst job. If I were you, I might spend three months or something sending out resumes and see if you get responses.

For what little it's worth, as at some point I fell off the software engineering end of data science, as it were, and it sounds like you're talking about the other end of the spectrum, but I have had a few co-workers with an analytics/data science/operation research/statistics master's, a number who winged it coming out of a PhD (I was in this bucket) and (functionally) none that came out of a bootcamp.* My anecdata says do the masters, but it's the fact you have at least adjacent prior job experience that's really going to work in your favor.

*The exception is Insight Data Science, but they're still in the "PhD in something else" bucket.
posted by hoyland at 7:38 PM on October 31, 2019

I’m team certificate, see what happens, maybe a masters. I work with a lot of self-trained people who did some MOOCs and a few kaggle competitions. My opinion is that they often don’t know where they’re lacking, whether it’s in not understanding statistics or in assuming that an optimization algorithm will always find a global minima.
posted by Valancy Rachel at 10:39 PM on October 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

I completed a data science bootcamp last year. It was really helpful because I, like you, am terrible with the self-motivating. Plus, there's just *so much* online re: data science, so it was nice to have someone tell me where to start.

I became gainfully employed less than a month after graduating. That being said, it really did help that I'm nearly finished my PhD in a semi-quantitative field, and that my dissertation has a lot of quantitative analysis that I could discuss as experience in interviews. The people who did best in my cohort, and who are now employed, also had advanced degrees and other analytics experience.

Another thing to consider is whether you want to do data *analytics* or data *science*. There's overlap, but expectations are different for these roles. If you're more into the analysis side of data, and don't really care about building predictive models, then an analytics-focused program is probably better. We focused very heavily on the programming and modelling side of things in my bootcamp.

One last point -- I'm not sure if Metis is like this, but there are bootcamps that don't require you to pay until you've actually gotten a job where you're making >$X/year. So that might make things less scary for you, financially.
posted by thebots at 1:57 PM on November 1, 2019 [1 favorite]