It seems that 2014 will be a great year for analytics professionals. It's not me saying that, but several authoritative sources in the world business. To mention a few of them:
- according to research company Gartner, over the next two years, by 2015, there will be 4.4 million big data jobs available; and just a third of them will be successfully filled.
- data scientist is gonna be the sexiest job of the century, according to Harvard Business Review. Earlier in 2009, H. Varian (chief economist @Google) said pretty much the same during an interview talking about statisticians.
- Forbes states that 2014 is gonna be the year of Digital Marketing Analytics and companies need to get prepared for that (if they want to win more shares of the market).
- while many other sources emphasize the importance of relevant education to fill the talent gap in analytics.
For us, digital analysts, I guess this is all great news. But the other EVEN NICER NEWS - and that's the topic of this post - is that lot of this analytics education is freely available through the internet. Ever heard about MOOCs? I have taken a couple of those courses, and beside the zero cost required to enroll, the QUALITY was the thing impressed me the most. A couple of my previous posts actually came from some fantastic assignments I was given as part of the courses.
Going back to 2014, I'd like to suggest 3 courses starting right this month. I have enrolled to all of them, they look very promising and hopefully will be able to complete them all.
1) Google Analytics Platform Principles
2) Making Sense of Data
3) Doing Journalism with Data