Machine Learning and Data Science, promising technologies of the future, are attracting professionals to upskill and move ahead of their current jobs and roles. A major reason is saturation and monotony that has crept into traditional IT roles that push ambitious professionals to move up the tech-ladder. Read how Bharani Srinivas moved to Standard Chartered Bank as an ML specialist.
What is your professional background?
I have completed my bachelors in Electronics & Communications Engineering in the year 2013. After that, I joined as a Web Developer in Cognizant and worked there for 3 years. Then, I moved to Nationstar Mortgage as a Full-stack developer and worked there for 2.25 years. Currently, I am working as an ML Specialist in Standard Chartered Bank.
How did you develop an interest in this course? How did you decide to go with GL?
With my previous roles, I was in a routine job and became boring for me. I started looking for options that I could move to and came across IoT, BlockChain and Machine Learning. It was fascinating to see how ML & DL can be used to handle enormous data; whether structured or unstructured. Also, these fields are going to stay for a longer time in the market, so I thought to transition to Data Science. I took a couple of online courses from Coursera, etc. but couldn’t continue as they were a little unstructured and haphazard. Also, I had no clarity about which course to opt for, out of the multiple options available. In the need for a formal course from reputed firms, I started looking for Institutes and came across ML course of Great Learning. I took this course as it was a blended program; classes once a month & enough time to practice, as for working professional it gets difficult to manage.
What did you like the most in the program at GL?
Since I had already checked online courses, I had clarity about what the syllabus should include. The thing that made me convert here is how the syllabus is designed and how carefully it is structured. They started with Statistics so that we can have a strong foundation of basics and slowly developed covering all the topics in-depth. The added advantage to the aspirants was the course was hands-on, which gave a better understanding of every topic. We had industry-expert sessions which gave us an understanding of applications of the field. Overall the course is designed as per the needs of working professionals, keeping a check that they keep us engaged and occupied for a month with multiple projects, reading the material and hands-on experience.
Share your transition story to Standard Chartered Bank.
I got placed in SCB through a GL connection; a classmate at GL referred me to SCB. I got interviewed by them and had one Technical round which was majorly on NLP, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. It was a bit easy for me to crack the interview as I had already taken some projects with my previous company in parallel with the course. The learning at GL and implementation at work, this helped me crack the interview and is presently helping me with the role at Standard Chartered Bank.
Any advice to the future aspirants of this program?
The only advice would be to choose precisely as per one’s interest from the available options. Also, your previous experience will help you in figuring out what course you should take and how your experience will add value to your learning here. Another perspective would be to identify how ML can add value to your current role and how can things could be improvised using ML. This will help you have an understanding of tools better and ease in transition.
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