Let me start with my background to give a bit of context here. I have a PhD in Computer Science followed by two years postdoctoral experience. Recently, when I started thinking about joining industry, I found my skill set not up-to-date with the kind of job I was interested in. I learned Algorithms, Theory of Computation, Distributed Computing, Software Engineering, and courses around bioinformatics and computational biology during my PhD. These courses were useful for a strong foundation in computer science and, of course, for performing scientific research in discrete algorithms as applied to bioinformatics and computational, which I had been doing for last seven years. But for the Data Scientist position, which I recently started considering, I needed to learn few things. I had some experience with MOOCs. Though my background is in Computer Science, I learned quite a bit of statistics through Khan Academy and by auditing classes in my campus. MOOCs are definitely more flexible compared to Interactive Online Education (IOE) or a university class, but they are less interactive so they require slightly more motivation to deal with the monotony. After some research I decided to join “Big Data and Hadoop” course at Edureka. Here is what I liked about it.
1. The course content is very well organized, with demos and useful online links, and examples from real industry problems. (After the first class I really felt that I not only needed this class for learning Big Data/Hadoop but also to learn the common industry lingo for the transition from academia to industry 🙂
2. The instructor was knowledgeable (not just bookish knowledge, but industry experience to bring real examples) and humble person. I particularly noticed his genuine interest in tailoring the class (e.g., setting up a policy/timing for question and answer during the class) to meet our needs.
3. I found it very useful to have the course content available at LMS. Unfortunately, I had to miss couple of classes in the end, but I feel content that the video recordings of lectures are available so I can explore at my own convenience.
4. I have learned a lot about the extraordinary support team of Edureka. I hardly had any issues but I saw other batch mates were bugging them every now and then. I think a good support team is a must for such interactive education. In general setting up a system is more difficult than using it. A handy support team can definitely make your life much better!
Overall, I had a wonderful experience, which made me also join “Statistics Essentials for Analytics” course at Edureka. I am not joining this course as a complete novice, but this course will make me real hands-on person in statistics by doing the homeworks/projects and offer me class-room kind of confidence (as I am imagining to present myself as an expert in it).
Finally, I will recommend Edureka to anybody looking for online education to keep oneself up-to-date with the latest trends in the technology. It’s both money and time well spent!
Pros
-
“Productive team; good place to learn and grow”
-
“Good Work culture, great manager”
- The best training ever and trainer are the best
- – Structured start-up
- -Good for people of technical roles as their team manager is very employee friendly
Cons
-
“Sometimes work-life balance takes a hit”
-
“No work-life balance, less salary”