Hello, My name is Ankit Kumar Agarwal, and I am currently working with Infosys Ltd as Principal Consultant and settled in Bangalore with my wife Prity and a 6-year-old son Atharva. I have been engaged in IT Consulting and Services in the Retail business domain for the most part of my career. I started my professional journey back in 2002 after completing B.Tech from IIT BHU (Banaras Hindu University), and I thank God for a successful and rewarding career so far.
I was working with Nexgen Technologies as Senior Project Manager and primarily engaged in Analytics and Business Intelligence for the Retail business domain.
The Indian IT Industry is going through a big transformation. A lot of new technologies like Cloud Computing, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, IOT, etc., are sweeping the market, and it is forcing everyone to upskill in order to stay in the game.
Like many other senior IT professionals, I also found it very difficult to upskill myself with seemingly little time to spare after fulfilling other responsibilities both at professional and personal fronts. There was a time in my career when I was even thinking of taking a break and joining a full-time classroom program to gain the competitive edge I was looking for. I always felt the time was running out, and sooner or later, I would have to make a decision.
While searching for professional courses online, I came across Great Learning and the various courses it had to offer.
I had my apprehensions about the online medium as I had never joined such a course before and was not sure if it would have the same impact as a full-time classroom program. But I felt more confident after interacting with the Program Office. They shared the link for the Olympus platform so I could get a feel for it even before I started the course. They also shared feedback from pass-outs of prior batches, and I took their feedback about the course.
PGP DSBA was definitely a critical milestone in my professional journey. It was a long, eventful 11-month engagement, and I feel more confident about Data Science and online courses in general now than I used to at the start of the course. At the time of joining this course, I was already working in the Business Intelligence and Analytics domain, and Data Science felt such a natural extension for my professional growth. There is still a lot to learn about Data Science, but the sessions in PGP DSBA have definitely given me the solid base that I was looking for.
Top of the drawer and very professional. All the mentors were renowned personalities in Data Science and Education fields, and the sessions were designed meticulously, keeping in mind the need of working professionals. I was also very impressed by the quality of the Olympus ed-tech platform.
Extremely important. There were few courses where just the online content was enough to clear the concepts, but then there were many Data Science topics that seemed really difficult at first, but the mentor session made it a lot easier. Also, some of the mentor sessions brought a different view of the same concept to the table, which made the learning easy and fun. All my mentors were experts in their fields and very helpful and approachable.
I feel I have built a solid foundation for Data Science through this course and, in the process, also earned a dual degree from Great Lake and UT Austin to add more weightage to my resume. Data Science is cutting across various business domains and industries now, and this opens up more career opportunities for me.
Data Analytics and Business Intelligence are great techniques to analyze and improve business processes. If you combine it with Data Science, it allows you to do a lot more than just building reports and dashboards. We are passing through a very exciting phase of Information Technology where NexGen technologies like Cloud Storage, Cloud Computing, Big Data, ML, etc., are making data storage and data processing a lot easier and a lot faster which has ushered in a new era for Data Science and Business Intelligence. This is a difficult art to master, though, and people who want to build a successful, long-lasting career in Data Science need to find newer ways to upskill themselves periodically, and online courses like GL PGP DSBA are certainly one of them.
