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Berkeley Offers Its Data Science Course Online For Free (berkeley.edu)
In a news bulletin, University of California, Berkeley announces that its "Foundations of Data Science" course is "being offered free online this spring for the first time through the campus's online education hub, edX." From the report: The course -- Data 8X (Foundations of Data Science) -- covers everything from testing hypotheses, applying statistical inferences, visualizing distributions and drawing conclusions, all while coding in Python and using real-world data sets. One lesson might take economic data from different countries over the years to track global economic growth. The next might use a data set of cell samples to create a classification algorithm that can diagnose breast cancer. (Learn more from a video on the Berkeley data science website.) The online program is based on the Foundations of Data Science course that Berkeley launched on campus in 2015 and now has more than 1,000 students enrolling every semester. The Foundations of Data Science edX Professional Certificate program is a sequence of three five-week courses taught by three winners of Berkeley's top teaching honor, the Distinguished Teaching Award: DeNero, statistics professor Ani Adhikari and computer science professor David Wagner. The first of the three parts has already started (9 a.m. on April 2), but enrollment will remain open after the course begins. Furthermore, anyone in the world can enroll for free but those who want to earn the certificate will need to pay.
I work in Data Engineering, leading teams of what used to be known as ETL Developers building analytics warehouses and datamarts to power and operationalize models built by data scientists.
While over the past two or three years, it was considered , 2018 is supposedly the year of the Data Engineer.
These aren't new roles, by any means, they're simply coming out of the dark reaches of organizations and becoming an integral part of successful business. DE and DS resources are expected to make sense of non-sense and present those findings to wider audiences than even 3-5 years ago, including C-level executives.
The company I currently work for has a large number of numbers-focused resources which span the gambit and *ALL* of them could benefit from learning the basics of how to take the data they use to the next level without having to rely on DE/DS teams to get it to them.
Just like spreadsheets are consumed and used by all levels of an organization, in a few years, DE and DS tasks will likely see similar amounts of proliferation across job titles. Yes, this approach can be fraught with challenge; however, it would serve any one who is in a field where they're analyzing data in spreadsheets or otherwise collecting and understanding data to take at least a basic course and bring themselves out of Excel pivot/macro/VBA hell into something more manageable.
TL;DR - take the course and apply the learnings to your own stuff. Maybe you'll end up in one of the top careers in the country.