To address the growing demand for data scientists, Cloudera has launched what it calls the industry's first hands-on data science certification. Comprised of a Data Science Essentials exam, a twice-annual Data Science Challenge, as well as preparatory and enablement resources, Cloudera's data scientist certification program - Cloudera Certified Professional: Data Scientist (CCP:DS) - is aimed at helping developers, analysts, statisticians, and engineers get experience with big data tools and techniques and validate their abilities.
A provider of Hadoop training and professional certification, Cloudera offers a unified Platform for Big Data, an enterprise data hub built on Apache Hadoop. Following a recent funding round of $160 million (led by T. Rowe Price, and including an investment by Google Ventures and an affiliate of MSD Capital, L.P., the private investment firm for Michael S. Dell and his family), Cloudera also recently received what was described as a significant equity investment from Intel, making it Cloudera's largest strategic shareholder and a member of its board of directors. The investment was said to be Intel's single largest data center technology investment in its history.
According to Cloudera, it is launching the data science certification program now to address to address a pressing challenge in the IT industry: job openings for data scientists are currently outpacing the supply of these in-demand workers, a situation that is complicated by the fact that there has historically not been a clearly established skill set or university degree that an individual could acquire to qualify as a data scientist. According to Cloudera, the result is that companies looking to hire their first data scientists frequently are unsure about what qualification to look for in a candidate.
Designed and led by Cloudera’s own team of data scientists, the CCP:DS program includes an optional three-day Introduction to Data Science course focused on teaching data professionals to build machine learning models and implement complex recommender systems with Hadoop as a platform using industry-standard tools like Python and Apache Mahout. Cloudera also offers a 60-question Data Science Essentials Practice Test for candidates to self-assess their exam-readiness, and a free Data Science Challenge Solution Kit consisting of a live data set, a step-by-step tutorial, and a detailed explanation of the processes required to arrive at the correct outcomes for real-world data science questions focused on classification, clustering, and collaborative filtering of web analytics.
Once candidates have passed the Data Science Essentials exam, they must pass a Cloudera Data Science Challenge, offered twice annually. By passing Cloudera's examination and live-data challenge, CCP:DS-credentialed individuals will be able to demonstrate their ability to work with big data and build market-relevant data science models under real-world conditions at a high level.
According to Cloudera, the Cloudera Certified Professional: Data Scientist certification is unique in that it provides proof of expertise developing a production-ready data science solution that has been peer-evaluated for accuracy, scalability, and robustness.
To learn more about the Data Science Challenge or to register, go here.
Cloudera is holding a webinar about the current Data Science Challenge on April 10. Go here for information.