Upskilling in the field of Data Science can surely be extremely helpful at any stage of your career. Read to learn about how Vetharaj Samson Shelton was able to benefit from Great Learning’s PGP Data Science and Business Analytics Course in his own words.
I’ve completed my M.E and M.B.A. Working for a UK based manufacturing MNC, Coats Plc. I have been associated with Coats for more than 21 years and held various positions in Digital and Technology functions and handled many complex projects covering SAP implementation, Digital Products development, Business Intelligence, Security, Cloud (Azure and GCP) and Infrastructure.
My major roles were developing and supporting Digital Products for Coats Plc and managing a team of cloud native developers.
The biggest challenge for me was to effectively work on large data sets and interpret the insights in business language. The DSBA program at Great Learning provided me a clear path and systematic approach to understand business problems, relevant data sets, tools and techniques required to extract the insights from the data and how to convert insights into business language and add values to business.
I looked at various courses and options. I finally decided to choose Great Learning based on the initial briefing from course consultants and the course methodology. Personally, I didn’t see any apprehensions around learning through online and in fact online mode has been very useful for me to balance my work place activities very well. Moreover the whole course has been structured to learn step by step with adequate mentoring at each level.
Mentoring sessions have been the highlight of this course. Mentors were all very accommodative and encouraging. Mentor sessions for each module really helped us to clarify our doubts as and when required and able to learn a lot from the experienced mentors as most of them are currently working on leading organizations.
These sessions really helped us to understand the concepts learnt regularly and the quality of the mentor sessions was great. Mentors normally tried to be very flexible and even clarified the basics outside their regular agenda for the specific week. In fact, mentors had played a key role in the whole learning journey.
Mentors were the integral part of the course and helped in all possible ways for us to understand the course content thoroughly. Mentoring sessions have been very helpful without which we wouldn’t have been able to clarify all our doubts during the course.
I picked up a few real time projects in the organization and tried to help business explain the insights from the relevant data sets used. I am currently managing a large e-commerce platform used by more than 22000 customers globally (B2B) and trying to build a predictive model to predict whether a customer will churn or not. Moreover, I tried many data visualization techniques using the real time data and did exploratory data analysis for select real data sets. I also Initiated a small learning group within the team and encouraged them to work more on Data Science and Analytics tools and techniques that may be of immense help to the organization.
New learners should first understand the basics of Data Science and Analytics through a structured course like DSBA that will provide them a strong footing on the foundations. Moreover, new learners should spend quality time on the case studies to understand better the business problem and find appropriate solutions. A well structured training will help new learners a lot in their learning journey obviously with proper mentoring support.
