When Alumnus Sridhar Kolappan decided to pursue the PG Program in Business Analytics and Business Intelligence, he had several apprehensions and concerns. In his own words:
Would the Great Lakes PGP-BABI be the right program for me to join?
I closely worked with NIIT for a year only to realize it wasn’t the right fit for me. I wasn’t sure if there was a program that would specifically cater to my needs as a learning professional. If I were a fresher in the field of analytics, things would have been different as everything would have been new and worthy of learning. However, given my experience, I was looking for a program that would go deeper than a superficial understanding of analytical tools and techniques. Thankfully, Great Lakes PG Program in Business Analytics was exactly that program. The way the program is designed, the course curriculum, content in terms of assignments and quizzes and capstone – I liked so many aspects of the analytics program.
Will the program be as boring as school/college or other online analytics courses with monologues?
Let’s face it! It is one thing to say hands-on or experiential, totally different to implement it especially when these terms have been used in the context of education. Lectures at college are mostly monologues that would end up leaving us drained. Coming back to class, I had the same apprehension but this Business Analytics course from Great Lakes exceeded my expectations. Dr. Bala V. Balachandran was there for one of our sessions and it is an absolute honour to hear him speak. No faculty member conducted a session just for the sake of delivering. Their commitment and resolve to see us succeed in this Analytics course was infectious and kept us motivated throughout. Attacking different real life analytics problem statements with an exciting bunch of people in the classroom was an experience second to none for me.
Will I be only working on clean datasets to learn data analytics or will I get industry relevant datasets?
As a recruiter in analytics, I am well aware how what you learn in an analytics course can be drastically different from your work in the industry later on. Even practice exercises on Analytics Vidhya and Kaggle give you a clean dataset to work with. When it comes to actual work though, an analyst has to work with a lot of unstructured data which requires cleaning and careful evaluation about how it must be used. I have asked various interviewees to work with such data and solve a problem but there are so many times when they end up saying they can’t work on it. PGP-BABI, to my surprise, prepares you for this drastic change by inculcating exercises and industry sessions in the curriculum to accommodate such adjustments that business analytics demands. Honestly, I haven’t had anyone from Great Lakes say in interview that they won’t be able to work on a given problem statement because the data is a certain way. Dr. PKV often asked us to learn concepts and the basics of statistics really well instead of learning just analytical tools. Now I know why!
What value will the PGP-BABI course add if I already know analytics?
I have worked with the RELX Group for over 11 years now in various capacities acquiring different skills. As I learned six sigma & lean, I realized it had a lot to do with data. That sparked my interest in data analytics and I have been pursuing it since then. But there were several aspects of analysis that I was still not aware of. Most of the courses would only cover superficial levels of business analytics, so I was quite sceptical about joining Great Lakes. But thanks to my decision of joining this analytics course, I was able to learn new techniques and connect the missing dots. My career got a much-required boost and I am now the Head of Analytics at the Centre of Intelligence at RELX Group.
Sridhar Kolappan’s story is one of the many examples of how Great Lakes programs exceeded our students’ expectations and transformed their careers. To read more such stories, click here.
