When it comes to picking the best training method for you, there are several things you’ll want to consider, including how quickly you need to learn the skills, how much money you can spend, whether you want to learn in-person or online, and whether you want to learn all of the major skills at once or spread your training out over a longer period of time.
The first question that students will want to answer is whether they are looking to enroll in a career-focused course (and therefore, commit the time and energy to learn long-term career skills) or if they are looking to learn specific skills (like SQL or Excel) in a more accelerated course. Career-focused courses will have the most long-term benefit for aspiring data analytics professionals, while shorter classes are better for students who are looking to learn specific skills in a shorter time frame.
The next question you’ll want to consider is whether or not you want to learn in-person or online since both options offer advantages and disadvantages for students looking to learn data analytics. In-person training offers students the chance to work face-to-face with their instructor and learn the skills they want to learn in a controlled environment that is designed to help them succeed. Many students report that they prefer in-person learning because they can talk directly to their instructors and work alongside their cohort. These courses also give students the ability to get live, instant feedback on their work in a way that can make it easier for them to overcome significant hurdles in the learning process. The drawback to these classes is that, because they are held at specific training centers, there are logistical concerns that students will need to address. This not only means finding a class that they can actually attend (since an in-person class held in Chicago is of little use to someone who lives in Louisville) but also accounting for the extra time, effort, and cost of commuting to and from a class.
By contrast, online learning gives students the option to learn from their own homes, meaning those aspiring data analysts in Louisville can learn the skills they want to learn from a training provider in Chicago. They will also learn how to do data analytics work from their home office, which can be particularly useful for anyone looking to find remote work opportunities. With the advances in remote pedagogy over the last few years, online classes are no longer playing second fiddle to in-person classes. The drawback to these courses is that students will need to be more self-motivated to not fall behind in their work, as the elimination of things like the commute and the time spent in the class can make the course feel less real and therefore, it can be easier for students to fall behind on their work. In addition, students will need to be more on top of things like troubleshooting tech issues and acquiring licenses for software (and ensuring that their personal set-up can run a complex set of data analytics applications while also running a digital classroom.
How long is a data analytics class?
The length of any given data analytics class will depend on what skills are being taught and how career-focused the class is. Classes like the Noble Desktop Data Analytics Certificate program or the Data Analytics Bootcamp will run for several weeks (or months in the case of part-time classes), but they will cover all of the subjects that you need to know in order to become a professional data analyst. By contrast, shorter courses, like an introduction to SQL class (that is a part of the larger certificate program), may only take a few days of study, but students will need more training in order to become professionals. Thus, you can spread the courses out over a longer period of time, depending on the nature of your schedule and the timeframe you want to spend learning data analytics skills.
There are also a range of different on-demand classes that let you learn data analytics at your own pace. These classes, which are most often recorded lectures and video explanations of various skills, techniques, and tools, are designed to let students learn data analytics skills as quickly or as slowly as they need to learn them. This gives students significantly more control over the length of their data analytics training, but these courses come with drawbacks. Most notably, without access to a live instructor, students will need to find alternative options for dealing with roadblocks or concepts that don’t make sense. In addition, these classes aren’t always kept up-to-date with the newest versions of applications or the latest trends in data analytics (for example, will the video lessons account for the rise of AI tools). These classes can be a useful supplement to live courses, but unless attending a live class is completely out of the cards, you’ll want to use these as added training rather than the primary mode of learning data analytics.