Where to learn Big Data skills
A student wrote to me: “I am a third year student in Computer Science. I want to learn more about Big Data but what are the skills that I need to get a job in this area? Where can I learn these skills? Please advice.”
Answer: There are several categories in Big Data career depending on the degree and skills. However all of them are focusing on the analysis of large amounts of data of a variety of types to find trends and patterns that may reveal certain valuable information. Such information can provide competitive advantages over other competitors resulting in business benefits. The goal of big data analytics is to help companies use these information to make better business decisions.
Big data analytics often starts with the collection and analyzing internal “structured data” stored in company’s database so the skills that you need are: Database administration, Machine learning, and Data mining. (these skills are often taught in Information System Management program). The next step is to collect and analyze external “unstructured” data from other sources such as the Internet. Because these data are unstructured and not defined, you cannot use existing tools of database and data mining but need different technology designed to handle them such as NoSQL database, Hadoop and MapReduce. Since these are new, few universities are teaching them. However, to make them available to everyone who want to learn, many professors decide to put their training courses on line as part of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) that you can access and learn without paying anything.
- California Institute of Technology: http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html
- Learn Hadoop: http://hadoop.apache.org/
- Big Data Courses from Coursera University: https://www.coursera.org/
- edX courses from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): https://www.edx.org/
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
