The world’s leading publication for data science, AI, and ML professionals.

Don’t Expect An Online Course to Get You a Job

If you're reading this, chances are you at one point have either taken an online course or thought about taking an online course.

Now, don’t get me wrong, online courses are great! You can learn so much online and that is truly amazing.

But – I find often there is a disconnect between the expected outcome of taking an online course and what actually happens. Let me first preface with the fact that I am specifically speaking to Data Science courses as those are the courses I am more familiar with. Other types of courses might lead to different outcomes.

Let’s start with a story of a young data scientist looking to break into the field.

Photo by Vlad Bagacian on Unsplash
Photo by Vlad Bagacian on Unsplash

Our data scientist has heard that deep Learning is a highly prized skill to have in the job market, so she immediately signs up for Andrew Ng’s Coursera course on deep learning. This is great! I love this course. She does excellent in the course, passes with flying colors, and leaves with a certificate to prove it! She then posts about it on LinkedIn, adds it to her resume, and…nothing changes.

Does this sound familiar?

What went wrong?

Our data scientist has clearly gained a valuable skill, shouldn’t that matter to the job market?

Unfortunately, the problem with most of the online courses is that it is too easy to pass the course and thus there are too many people with certificates for these courses. When anything becomes too common, recruiters stop paying attention.

You have to remember that a recruiter usually needs to limit the pool of applicants and thus needs to identify unique attributes that are hopefully correlated with success. This leads to a strange phenomenon where the best classes become the most popular, but due to their popularity, they stop becoming useful differentiators.

Photo by Noah Näf on Unsplash
Photo by Noah Näf on Unsplash

Now – that doesn’t mean the learning isn’t useful. It just means that if your goal of taking an online course is to get a job, you will likely be disappointed unless you do something unique with what you learned.

Thinking back to our recruiter, you need to take what you learned and create something unique that is correlated with success for the role they are hiring for. A common way to do this is through your own data science project. Not the projects the course had you do, but something that is uniquely yours. This is harder but infinitely more valuable. If you need help getting started, check out my free guide.

So, keep learning, but as you are learning think about the results you are hoping to achieve. If you are hoping to use your new skills to break into data science, make sure you do something unique.


Get your Free Guide to creating an amazing data science project.


Related Articles