222: Why Getting Data Certifications Is An AWFUL Idea

Most people who break into data don't fail because they're not smart enough. They fail because they spent six months on the wrong thing, which is often getting a certificate. And when it didn't get them the job, they decided that they were the problem, and they gave up. But they weren't the problem. The certificate was. So today, I'm gonna show you why certificates are a trap and exactly what to do instead. And just real quick on why you should listen to me on this, I run findadatabjob.com, which is a job board that has posted over 15,000 different data jobs, and I'm literally looking at hundreds of real data job postings every single day, and I've literally studied that for over a year and a half now. I've also helped over 500 people actually land data jobs, career pivoters just like you. So this isn't really a hot take. It's what the hiring data is actually saying and what I'm actually seeing in industry. And let me just go ahead and try to get ahead of the comments here. I'm not saying that certificates are completely worthless. They're not completely worthless. They're just not marketed to you the way that they actually should be. They are really misrepresentative of what they actually should be. You can probably make a certificate worth it, and I'll explain how to do that towards the end of this episode. But even more importantly, I'm going to show you the thing that you should be doing instead of the certificates, the thing that actually got me and my students hired, the thing that got us out of tutorial hell and into the data world, so stick around for that because that's the only thing that really matters. All right, let's start with number one reason why certificates aren't really worth it, and that is they do not matter in industry, and now that they're too common, it really doesn't matter in industry. And let me prove the first part. So I've actually looked at, like, 11,000 of the most recent data analyst job descriptions on my job board website, and I searched every single one of them for any cert or certificate. The Google certs, the PL-300 from Power BI, the IBM one, the Meta one, the DataCamp, any of them, and you know how many of them actually mentioned a requirement of a data analyst certificate? Zero. Not even one. And it's not just my research. Dataquest interviewed real hiring managers and decision-makers and published 200 pages of transcripts of how data hiring actually works. The number of times that the word certificate comes up in those 200 pages, absolutely zero. So let's just go ahead and s- kill this myth. Let's bust it right now. Hiring managers are not sitting there, like, looking at your resume, and they're like, "Is this person certified or not? Oh, they are? Hired. Oh, they're not? Toss it into the black hole of oblivion." If certificates actually mattered, it would be inside of the job description, and it's clearly not. But here's the part that actually gets worse recently. Even if a cert did give you a tiny edge in the past, it doesn't anymore because literally everyone and their dog has them. Like, literally two and a half million people have started the Google Data Analytics certificate alone. Two and a half million. So when you're putting it on the resume, you're not really separating yourself from the pile. You're becoming part of the pile. A certificate basically says, "Hey, I watched some videos, and I clicked some multiple choice answers, and I'm ready to be a data analyst," and no one's really buying that. That's not really standing out, and you're actually really standing in. And in this competitive market, you have to stand out. Which actually brings me to reason number two that certs suck, and this one's more important than people realize because certificates, especially the way they're doing it online these days, train you to follow instructions, not to solve problems. And those are two entirely different skill sets. They are not the same. If you think about what a cert actually is, the data is pretty clean The question's handed to you, and oftentimes you don't even have to leave your browser. You don't have to download anything. You're doing data analytics in the browser with the question given to you and the data cleaned given to you. That is not real life, you guys. It's not real life. Like, they give you all these multiple choice, you know, this nice little sandbox where, like, nothing can go wrong. It's just not reality. Think about what an actual data job is. The data is an absolute disaster. It's all over the place. It's messy. It's dirty. Half of it doesn't even make any sense. You know, no one's really handing you, "Hey, solve this question." You have to figure out what questions to ask, and there is never an answer key in real life like there is in these certifications. And if there were, they wouldn't need to hire you to solve the problem. So the cert is drilling you on one habit that the actual job doesn't even require and actually discourages. Like, you can't just sit and wait and be told what to do on the job, and that's why so many people finish a cert, and they feel like, "Oh, my gosh, I'm so ready. I'm gonna land my first data job. I'm gonna start applying for jobs. I'm gonna walk in." And they get handed this spreadsheet, and they're like, "Hey, can you look at this and give me the answers?" And then they're like, "Oh, crap. That's not what this certificate taught me." Nobody ever made them sit down and go through the whole mess, the whole process, and that's actually how shallow it is. I went through, and I count how many times you actually run a SQL query, one of the most important things to do as a data analyst. How many times you run a SQL query in the entire Google Data Analytics certificate, and you have six months that you're in this program according to them, right? You run 25 queries. You run 25 queries, you guys, in six months. That's like one a week, and you can't learn SQL by doing one query every week for six months. That's just like, that's not fast enough. That's not realistic. You cannot learn to solve real problems doing one query in a week in a browser sandbox. It's just flatly not enough reps. Now, moving on to reason three, and this is the one that actually hurts people. The cert hands you a fake finish line, as much as I hate to see it, and here's what I mean. You spend these six months. You're grinding. You finish finally. You get the certificate with this nice little PDF with your name on it, and it feels like, "Whoo, I crossed the finish line." And you're like, "All right. I'm qualified now. I'm ready. Time to go to a job." And so you start applying, and you don't really hear back. And then you apply more, and you don't really hear back. And then you start to get rejected, and then you get rejected again. And then you apply again and get rejected again, and that just happens continuously until you just cry and give up. And here's the dangerous part. Because the certificate made you feel qualified, when these rejections pile up, you don't blame the certificate. You blame yourself. You start thinking, "Oh, maybe I'm just not smart enough in this. Maybe data's not for me. Maybe I'm not a tech person." And when those thoughts come, that's when people quit. It's not because they're not smart enough because I definitely think they are. I think you are smart enough to become a data analyst. But you quit because the certificate said, "Hey, if you cross this finish line, you're gonna land a job." That's the promise that they're giving you, and then this crash that comes down makes you feel like it was you. Let's be clear about this. It was never you. The cert qualified you for the test at the end of the certification, those little multiple choice quizzes. It did not qualify you for the job, and those are two separate things, and no one told you that those are two separate things. Like, it's not your fault. The real cost of this certificate isn't the money. It's... They're all pretty cheap, to be honest. The real cost is the opportunity cost of- Of the time you spent doing the wrong things. And it's such a shame because it can make a perfectly good data analyst candidate literally give up and just stay in the career that they hate. Which actually leads me into reason number four, and it's the opportunity cost. Because those six months, you might think that they're cheap, but they're not. Every month you spend on a cert is a month that you're not spending on stuff that actually gets you hired. And it's worse than just lost time because the certificate teaches you literally the wrong skills on the way out the door. The Google cert spends so much time on R, which is a tool that I like. I love R. I think it's really fun. But R only shows up in 4% of all data analyst job postings. 4%, you guys. Like, literally, you're spending time learning R, and it doesn't really even show up on job descriptions. Do you think how crazy that is? Like, you're wasting your time learning that. And when it teaches you spreadsheets, it uses Google Sheets, which is fine. Google Sheets is a fine tool, but you're going to be using Excel on the job. Excel is literally listed a hundred times more on real job descriptions than Google Sheets. So, like, why not just learn Excel? Like, why learn Google Sheets? And I know they're similar, but, like, let's learn what matters. But Google doesn't want you to do that because they want you to use their product. So you're gonna come out of this having spent months on the tools that the market isn't really even asking for, while high-demand tools, fast-to-learn stacks like Excel, SQL, Tableau, they really get shortchanged in the whole process. And the deeper problem is that any fixed curriculum is frozen in time, and the market is moving literally every single year. Honestly, it's probably moving every six months. And a cert that was built, like, years ago can't really keep up. So just a question here: Are you spending your most valuable resource, your time, learning skills that don't really matter in the long term? If so, it's time to make a change So, okay, is a certificate ever worth it? And the answer is yes. Like, you were once a total beginner, if you're not a total beginner right now, and you need something structured just to, like, figure out what the heck's even going on. Like... And that's okay, and that's what the certificate is. But I think there are better ways to actually get that orientation of what's going on. But it's better than nothing. Like, starting something is better than nothing. Starting something structured is better than starting something unstructured. But if certs aren't the perfect path, then what is, and what should you do instead? And my answer is the SPN method. Like, this is it. This is the thing that actually works and fixes everything that we just talked about. So SPN stands for skills, projects, and networking. And the reason that certs fails is they give you one really bad version of these. Like, it's literally zero of projects and networking and just kind of okay skills. Skills, they matter. Like, they're actually important. You need to have real applied skills to all the tools that the market is using, but you don't just need skills. If you ignore projects and networking, you do it at your own peril. Projects are proof that you can actually take a business problem, get the messy and confusing data, and create a business solution using that data. And no, the random capstone that's optional at the end of the Google cert, the random bike share in New York City one doesn't count. Like, that's just been done a million times, and it's just so trivial. Like, you need to have a project that not that many people have done, that you have a unique approach on, and even better if it's in a niche that you care about. Your goal is to make the hiring manager stop scrolling or paging through resumes and actually pay attention to you. And networking is important because most jobs don't actually come from the apply button. I hate to say it as someone who owns a job board. They come from people, a network, a referral, a cohort going through it with you so you're not alone. Like, that is huge. You need to be networking. And if you're not doing all three in equal weight, you're going to have issues. If you skip even one of the S, the P, or the N, you're probably going to fail. And a certificate gives you like, let's say, a third of the skills, and you're missing out on the rest of the skills, the rest of the projects, and the rest of the networking. So my recommendation is to learn the skills. The skills that matter are Excel, SQL, and some business intelligence tool. I like Tableau, but if you want to choose Power BI, I'm not going to complain. Build projects with those, post them on a portfolio, and then start networking with hiring managers, recruiters, your neighbors, your friends, your cousins, literally everyone. The SPN method, and that is the path to actually landing your job. Now, everything I just talked about is absolutely free. Like, you can go learn skills for free. You can build projects for free. You can put them on portfolio for free. You can network for free. And plenty of people do that. Like, you can do it on your own. But if you'd rather not do it alone and you'd rather not be guessing if you're on the right path or not, and you want to do it with friends and teammates and with my coaching and my network behind you, that's the whole reason I built the Data Analytics Accelerator. Over five hundred people have gone through the program and absolutely loved it. They've learned the skills that they needed to learn. They've built the projects and put them on a portfolio, and they've done the networking necessary to land a job. If they had questions, they came to office hours and got them answered, or they asked in our community and our mentors answered them within 24 hours. And that's a realistic option for you if you are curious about it. But whatever you choose, to do it on your own or to do it with us, that's 100% up to you, and obviously you need to do what is best for you. I wanna make sure you have all the information you need about our accelerator, our bootcamp, so there's a link in the description down below. Please click it and check it out