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Thought I needed a master's to switch into data work, then I did the math on 8 months of night classes
I put off switching into data work for two years because everyone told me I needed a master's degree to even get interviews. Last August I finally signed up for a $4,200 online certificate through a state school in Ohio, mostly because a coworker named Dana said her sister got hired with just that. It took me 8 months of classes after work instead of the 2 years a master's would have taken, and I finished in April. What surprised me is that the hiring manager at my current company cared way more about the 3 dashboard projects I built than the certificate itself. I still don't know if this path works at bigger companies that filter by degree, or if I just got lucky with an internal move. Has anyone here made a similar switch without the grad degree and hit a wall later on?
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alex_hall9121d ago
Did you run into the degree filter when you started applying out? I did the same thing two years ago, a cheap analytics cert plus three projects where I pulled real sales data and built a simple churn model. Those projects got me two callbacks, but a few big places auto rejected me because their system wanted a bachelor's in a related field. Smaller and mid size companies never asked about the degree at all. So my guess is you'll hit a wall at some of the giant firms, but the internal move gives you the years of job title that matters more later.
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