Data Engineering certification

For a year that has been bad for many reasons - personally, finally I have something to cheer about and worth sharing!

To make use of the time I had at hand on something other than Netflix, news, worrying about covid-19 and recession, this July I enrolled into Udacity's data engineering nano degree program. I admit, I had my share of skepticism about the program: 

How would this benefit someone like me who is a project/program/delivery management practitioner?

Will I be able to complete all the course end projects and the final capstone project at an "acceptable level" and well within the program duration, esp. considering the coding involved?

Now, with the program behind me, I've the below to share on these questions - retrospectively.

First, let me start with the question: "Will I be able to complete all the course end projects and the final capstone project at an "acceptable level" and well within the program duration?"

When I started with course-1 - I was shaky. The question, will-I-be-able-to was ringing loud in my ears. By the time, I was closing on the course, the underlying database concepts - 3NF, entity & referential integrity, database objects, SQL, locks and types, others and bringing it all together using Python started coming back to me as though they were stacked at the back of my brain - just to be pulled out, dusted off and used. Wow!

This course definitely stepped up my confidence. No more of the "will-I-be-able-to" ringing in my ears! I went onto complete the subsequent courses. Delivered course end projects on Cassandra, Redshift, AWS concepts, S3, Data lakes, Spark and Airflow on-time and did so on the final capstone project as well. Hurray!

Now, to the question: How would this benefit someone like me who is a project/program/delivery management practitioner?

I knew the answers to this question even before I started on it. Why would I enroll into a course that I'm not convinced of the benefits it brings? So, what I share here is not in retrospective. However, having completed the course now, it has helped me to verify and confirm on the benefits I assumed at the start of the course.

The benefits from this course to my practice are nothing new. To repeat, they benefit me along 5 dimensions - at a minimum and are key success factors on any project, program or delivery. They are: Better understanding, Better articulation, Decision making, Collaboration and Confidence. Juxtapose these dimensions alongside the key activities of my practice viz. Method adoption (or MAW), In scope and out of scope, Requirements (esp. NFRs), Solution approach, Estimates and estimating assumptions, Planning and re-planning, Risks/Issues/Dependency/decision management, Stakeholder management, Status reporting, V&V activities, Execution and tracking, SLAs, Credibility with the team, others. In short, this helps me balance the technical prowess required for the role with the soft skills of management and leadership.

To close, I say, this program was challenging and rewarding!