Upskilling in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can prove to be extremely beneficial to power ahead your career. Read further to learn about Lakshman Prasad’s journey with Great Learning’s PGP Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Course in his own words.
I’m a passionate Automobile Engineer with six years of experience working in the R&D wing of a leading automobile company in Chennai; experienced in Vehicle Architecture Optimization, Vehicle Attributes management, and Benchmarking. I graduated in Mechanical Engineering from a reputed Engineering college in Coimbatore with academic proficiency, and I have been a National award recipient for the best student project.
I have been part of a product development team in a leading automobile company since my graduation. I have been part of various teams within the company, starting from Vehicle Integration, Concept Engineering, Attributes Management, Target setting, etc., and have contributed to the successful launch of two SUV products.
My entire professional career involved dealing with a lot of datasets that could be used for Benchmarking, Target setting, etc. This required expertise in Data Mining & Statistical Analysis, Data Visualization & Presentation, Special tools for Data analytics, etc. However, being a graduate in Mechanical Engineering, I lacked in the above-said domains, which I wanted to improve. That is when I got to know about Artificial intelligence and the Machine Learning area, which I thought would help me in my career. The quest to learn more about AIML made me look for a good course that would help me upskill myself in the domain.
When I was looking for a good blended course on AIML, I was introduced to the Great Learning platform through google search. I felt the platform to be unique with a systematic approach towards teaching the AIML concepts. I was impressed with the course structure with nominal fees and hence joined the course. Initially, I had apprehensions about learning through an online medium because I felt there would be a lack of face-to-face connections and collaboration among the learners. However, the Great learning team explained the importance of mentoring sessions and group projects within each module, which would help in improving the collaboration among the learners. They cleared all the doubts before admission.
As told earlier, mentored learning sessions are important because those sessions help in having a better connection with your mentor & co-learners. Also, mentored learning sessions helped us in understanding how the concepts are useful in the real world. Mentors were really helpful in sharing a lot of their knowledge, and their experience in the field helped us in our capstone project as well. They were kind enough to support us with any sort of help pertaining to the course/projects.
The quality of mentored learning sessions is excellent. The sessions were highly useful in clearing all our doubts. The mentors were kind enough to accept additional sessions if at all required to give a better understanding of the concepts to the learners. The documents/links shared during the course by the mentors are helping us even after the course completion. Their support is key in completing the capstone project with the perfect quality.
Since my role in my organization involves dealing with a lot of datasets & modeling, I was fortunate enough to apply all my newly learned skill sets in my official projects. More projects are planned which require the usage of AIML techniques, and I’m looking forward to the same.
My advice to people who are just starting with learning analytics is to keep your basics strong. Don’t worry if you are not able to understand things initially, do a lot of projects that would help you better understand the concepts. Learning after your working hours will look difficult initially. Try to take up a challenge that is part of your day-to-day office work and start implementing the new techniques. This would make learning easier.
