With big data expertise in high demand, both universities and private companies are ramping up their education programs and big data training. Gartner expects that the BDA market will have 4.4 million jobs available by 2015, but only about one-third of them will be filled.
So which big data training or certifications should you consider? RCR looked at the details of programs from five prominent big data companies. Some of the training programs are free, although the certifications generally are not.
— Oracle big data training: Oracle has a number of certifications on specific products, for both the telecom vertical and for database operations, including cloud. For ramping up your big data knowledge, check out its list of basic big data appliance and connectors training sessions for database administrators or application developers. This includes a couple of courses on big data basics and essentials for deeper understanding of big data concepts and applications; technical details of using Oracle’s NoSQL databases; and identifying business-use cases and getting familiar with Apache Hadoop.
— SAS big data training: The company offers specific certifications in advanced analytics, business intelligence and data management and administration. You can get a taste through its e-learning offerings: SAS offers a series of courses in advanced analytics and business intelligence, including specific training on customer intelligence related to marketing and more. Some are free and some have associated fees.
— SAP training and certification: SAP offers both training and certification, and even offers training courses via mobile devices on a free app. Its courses focus on the widely-used SAP HANA in-memory database platform, customer relationship management (CRM), BusinessObjects business intelligence and its mobilty platform.
— Microsoft SQL server training: Microsoft’s training ranges from entry-level database education to expert-level training on business intelligence. Each level is accompanied by a certification exam.
— IBM training and certifications: IBM’s course offering includes big data and analytics and the company has a certification for technical mastery for sales. For a good primer on big data-related issues, look at the lengthy objectives for its test on foundations of big data and analytics architecture.
— HP Vertica certification: HP introduced its first big data solutions certification program, for its HP Vertica Analytics platform, in early 2013. It’s available through HP’s ExpertOne program and while there are no prerequisites for the certification, HP recommends completing its online training first.
For a broader introduction to Vertica and big data, HP has a series of online modules with free access that include how to structure queries, event-based analytics and time-series analytics.
HP also offers a certification in selling its Vertica Big Data Solutions.
