Thomas Henson

Certifications Required For Hadoop Administrators?

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Certifications Required For Hadoop Administrators
Hadoop Certifications

Data Engineers looking to grow their careers are constantly learning and add new skills. What kind of impact do Hadoop Certifications have during the hiring process?

Data Engineers, Developers, and IT in general are known for their abundance of certifications. Everyone has an opinion as well about how much those certifications mean to real skills. On this episode of Big Data Big Questions find out what my thoughts are for Hadoop Admin Certifications and if Enterprises are requiring those for Data Engineers.

Transcript – Certifications Required For Hadoop Administrators

It’s the Big Data Big Questions show! Hi folks, Thomas Henson here with thomashenson.com. Today is another episode of… Come on, I just said it. Big Data Big Questions. Today’s question comes in from a user here on YouTube. If you have a question, make sure you put it in the comments section here below or reach out to me on thomashenson/big-questions. I’ll do my best to answer your questions here, live on one of our shows, or in one of our live YouTube sessions that we’re starting to do on Saturday mornings. Throw those questions in there. Let me know how are doing with this channel, and also if you have any questions around data engineering, machine learning. I’ll even take some of those data science questions, as well. Today’s question comes in around certifications in the Hadoop ecosystem. Are certifications required for Hadoop administrators/Hadoop developers? Absolutely, positively not. They’re not required, right?

Now, there may be some places where they’ll require you to. I did see that back in my day, in software engineering, but in general, they’re not going to be, not going to require you to have that before gaining entry. Now, they might be nice to have. Especially if you’re talking about going into an established team or an established group within your organization that, hey! We’re on the Horton Works stack, and we like to have everybody up to par from a certification perspective.

I haven’t seen that a lot specifically in the data engineering field, but it is something I’ve seen over the years in software engineering, but just not as much here lately. Now, does that mean that I’m saying that you shouldn’t go get a certification? That’s not what I’m saying at all. Especially if you’re learning and trying to get into the Hadoop ecosystem, and you’re like, hey, where do I really start?

First, you start with Big Data Big Questions.

Really, I can use the certifications. Whether it be from Azure, AWS, Cloudera, Horton Works, or Google GCP, Google’s Cloud Platform, you can take any of their certifications and really see, and build out your own learning path. That’s an opportunity there. Even if you’re not going to go down the path of trying to get that certification, if you’re trying to gain information and learn some of the things that you need to know as a good data engineer, whether it be on the developer side, whether it be on the administrative side, that’s definitely where I would start. That’s an opportunity there.

When we look at the question, it poses more of a philosophical question, if we will, in the data engineering and IT world, meaning how do we feel about IT certifications? I’ve answered this question. I had myself and Aaron Banks [Phonetic 00:02:31]. We were talking about specifically around IT certifications, and are they worth it, and we have a full-length video where we really dip into it. I’ll give you a little bit of a preview of my thought process around it.

The way that I look at certifications is, if you’re looking to be able to prove out, especially if you’re outside of a field, then hey, getting a certification might benefit you to make yourself more desirable to getting your application and getting your brand in there. Having a certification does lend some credence in those situations. However, if you’re established in the role, and you’ve been doing data engineering, and you have a lot of experience in it, necessarily you’re not going to really need to have that certification. You’ve been proven. You’ve down the due diligence of being in that role, and you’re applying for a role as a data engineer. You don’t necessarily have to go through that certification process.

Like I said, I really think that certifications are really good. Whenever we’re talking about, hey, maybe I don’t have that experience in that role, and I want to prove to you that, hey, I’m coming from, maybe you’re a web developer like I was. You’re a web developer, and you’re like, “Man. I’d really like to get into this,” Hadoop and this data engineering side of things. Where can I start, or how can I really identify myself to be somebody who wants to take on that next role? That’s where a certification is really going to help. You can get that certification. You can walk through it, but, you’re not going to walk in though, and say, “Hey, I’ve got the certification,” and you, Mr. Data Engineer, Miss Data Engineer, that’s been in that role for six years, “I know more than you do, because I have the certification.” That’s not really the case, and that’s probably not what you want to do, especially if you’re new to an organization.

Be honest, and be gentle in your interview process if you have a certification, but you don’t have the experience, and just say, “Hey, you know, I’m really passionate about it.” I’ve been following Big Data Big Questions for some time, and I thought that it’d be good to get into the data engineering field. To show how serious I am, I actually went through and got, walked through some of the certification process in there, too. Just an opportunity there for you to stand out from the crowd and show your experience, when you don’t really have experience. Let me know how you feel about this question and this answer here. Put it in the comment section below. Love to hear feedback. Also, if you have any questions, make sure you put them in the comments section here below, and never, never forget to subscribe and ring that bell, so that you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks again, and I’ll see you on the next episode of Big Data Big Questions.

 

Is an AWS Certification Required for Data Scientist?

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AWS Certification Required for Data Scientist

Will AWS Certification Help Data Scientist?

Every discipline in IT has different certification and the debate about the worth of those certification will go on forever. Data Scientist cross over with needing skills in coding, operations, and math. However the Data Scientist isn’t the only person on the Big Data Team. The Data Engineer tends to build and maintain the application, leaving the data modeling to the Data Scientist. With the division of labor should a Data Scientist get an AWS Certification?

In this video I will explore the requirements for Data Scientist and even break down a job posting from AWS for a Data Scientist. Watch now to find out about AWS certifications for Data Scientist.

Transcript – AWS Certification Required for Data Scientist?

Hey, how are you doing today? My name’s Thomas Henson, and welcome to another episode of Big Data Big Questions. And so, today I’ve got a very special question that came in from a user that we’re going to tackle. It’s about a certification in AWS. So, do you need a Certification AWS to be a data scientist? And so, I’m going to tackle that question. And then, we’ll also, actually, going to look and try to see some job descriptions out there that are posted and see what those job descriptions are, and how I would approach it, and where my thoughts are on the AWS Certification for data scientists, and looking all into the job description, too. So, find out all about this, right after this.

So, today’s question comes in from YouTube. So, I’ve got the question here. Before we start and jump into the question, I do want to remind you, if you have any Big Data Big Questions and you would like them answered, put them in the comments section here below, throw it out on Twitter using the hashtag Big Data Big Questions, or go to our website and you can send me any kind of question that you want and I’ll try my best to answer them here for you. Also, make sure you subscribe and hit the notification button so you never miss an episode and never miss when your question gets answered all here on YouTube.

So, today’s question comes in from… It’s on my Cloudera Data Engineering Certification question. So, we’re following along with certification questions here. So, he says, “Hi, will AWS Certified Solutions Architects Certification help in my data science career path?” So, this question is a large, large topic, right? So, I’m going to have to take some assumptions here and think, “Okay, so this person is looking for a career path into data science.” So, I’m thinking that they want to become a data scientist. And so, what they’re saying is, “Hey, to become a data scientist, do I need to have the base level AWS Certification?” The quick and dirty answer is no, but that’s all going to depend, too. So, it’s going to depend on what the job description is. And towards the end of this video, will actually go through and look at a job description specifically from Amazon and see, does even Amazon require AWS Certification for their data scientist?

So, jumping back into the question though, let’s assume that we’re not talking specifically just about becoming an AWS Certification for a data science career path. Let’s say that it’s a more broad topic. Maybe, it’s going to be a data engineer or a machine learning engineer. So, with those topics, remember, those are more hands-on as far as the technology and implementing different packages, whether it be HDFS, Yarn, Kafka, Pig, Hive, doing some of the systems administration work, but also doing some of the hands-on a machine learning work where you get to maybe implement some of the algorithms and doing the tuning and coding there.

So, in those career paths, do you have to have the AWS Solutions Architects Certification? It’s going to depend there. So, the first thing I would do is, would find out what the basis of wanting to get that certification is. So, if you’re data engineer or a machine learning engineer and you know that you’re… Say, within your company, you guys are using AWS, you’re using AWS for your big data projects, then it’s probably going to make sense for you to have some level of understanding of AWS platform. And specifically, if you’re at a company where you’re required to get the AWS Big Data Certification, then yes, getting this lower level certification for the Solutions Architect Associate, that’s going to benefit you greatly because AWS now requires for the AWS Big Data speciality, that you have a baseline certification. The Solutions Architect is one that’ll get you covered.

I will say that I have the AWS Solutions Architect Certification Associate. I was looking into the Big Data Certification there for AWS and doing some of the tactical things there. It was a great certification to give you those baseline skills because with my skill set, I came in, didn’t really have an understanding of all the offerings for AWS. Most of the stuff that I’ve always worked with is On-Prem. Working at a company that’s using AWS or knowing that you’re applying for a position that requires that AWS Certification, I’m going to say that most the time you’re not really going to have to have that AWS Certification. A lot of deployments… And you can look with… Hortonworks and Cloudera, a lot of their different deployments if you look, they’re overarchingly On-Prem. So, not saying that it’s going to hurt you for AWS, but if you’re trying really quickly, and this is a tactical decision to, within the next six months be able to roll into a position, odds are in your favor that you’re not going to deploying it in AWS, or, Azure, or even Google at this point.

So, I would look into maybe getting the Cloudera Certification or getting Hortonworks and just having that baseline information for the machine learning engineer, for your data engineer. Especially, if you’re data scientist, I don’t think that you’re going to need that.

So, let’s go back in and actually look at the question about data scientists and see what the job description is there. So, for this, let’s look… I’ve just pulled in here an Amazon data scientist position. This looks like it’s an Alexa position. So, you can see what they’re looking for is somebody that’s probably going to be able to do some kind of machine learning, maybe some deep learning on voice recognition as it comes in from Alexa and be able to provide some kind of prescriptive, or maybe even predictive analytics on it. But you can see, the majority of what they’re asking for is, they’re looking for… Yeah, they’re looking for some scripting languages here, so, maybe, some Perl or Python, or just some familiarity with those.

But it’s real heavy in the high-level techniques, right? Like what are we doing with machine learning, like building up those models and specifically really having more math-based skills? If you even look at the description here, and when we talk about the technical degree, they’re not really looking for a technical degree like we would think about the computer science, information system, management information system, computer information systems. They’re saying, “Hey, it’s okay, if you have a statistics background, some kind of applied math, or even an economics background.” And so, this right here, just looking at this one, so this is Amazon, right?

So, at Amazon, not saying that they’re not using AWS platform, but I’m saying, for a data scientist, and if that’s specifically the role that you’re looking at, necessarily, you’re not going to have to have that AWS Certification. You probably want to be somewhat familiar if you’re applying at Amazon. But outside of that, I wouldn’t think you’d need the certification. Even Amazon’s not asking for it here.

So, that’s my two cents on the AWS Certification in data science. If you have any questions, any follow-up questions, go ahead and put them in the comments section below. Make you subscribe so you never miss an episode, and I will see you next time.

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