Google Data Analytics Certification: My Review (2023)

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So you’ve heard all about this Google certification but you’d like to know more. You might have stumbled upon this post and thought about whether the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate is worth it.

Well, I’ve completed the entire course and have a CLEAR verdict of the certification.

Here’s what I found:

My Verdict: Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate

The Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate is worth it, especially for data analytics beginners. This introductory course is worth getting for its credibility, 174 hours of learning content, and career resources with connections to 130 US employers for an affordable cost of USD $49/month.

Now, you might be wondering if this certificate would be worth doing.

In this blog post, I’ll share some reasons why this certificate might be worth it for you, details of the cost, how long it takes to complete this certificate, and who should take this certificate.

The professional certification was made by Google to prepare learners with data analytics skills in R, SQL, Spreadsheets, Tableau, and BigQuery. The certification aims to help learners get an entry-level data analyst role without having a degree.

Here’s a video summary of my first impressions:

Let’s have a look at what others say!

Based on a poll I did on Linkedin, all of the respondents who have finished this Data Analytics Certificate by Google have found it to be worth it!

Check out the post screenshot below for proof:

Why Is This Certificate Worth It?

I completed this certificate in June 2021, and I’m pretty pleased with what I’ve gained from the course! I’ve managed to land a full-time role as a healthcare data analyst in 2021 and, subsequently, a bioinformatics/biomedical data scientist role in 2022!

Now that I’m looking back, I can safely say that this certificate has helped lay out the foundations in helping me in my data career.

During my course, I took down some main points and reasons why this certificate is worth buying.

Let’s have a look into some of the reasons why I think this certificate might be worth it for you!

1. Provides Basic Knowledge of Analytics

When you’re looking at starting a course to gain entry-level knowledge, you’d ideally want something with a good introduction to the basics.

That’s exactly what this course gave me – a basic foundation of knowledge of analytics.

Here are some of the skills I could pick out from the course that you will learn as you go through the program:

• Analytical skills (Tableau, SQL, Spreadsheets, R programming, Excel)
• Data governance, data integrity, and security
• Stakeholder management and asking the right questions
• Effective presentation of visualizations
• Crafting a good online analytics portfolio

As you can see, the courses provide all the essential tools and skills within the data ecosystem that are perfect for a junior data analyst role.

Based on my background as a healthcare data analyst, these skills are definitely essential to have in the data analysis process.

I personally feel that Tableau is worth learning as an essential data visualization tool, and this course is a great way to start!

If you’re curious to know more about visualizing data using Tableau, you can read more about it in my other post here.

SQL is another good skill used by most data analysts for data cleaning. It can also be used to analyze data and process data before exporting to a data visualization platform.

R programming is also great for data analysis and visualizing data after processing.

This career-focused analytics program does a great job of covering topics within the data analytics field, especially when covering skills used in a typical data analyst’s job.

Using spreadsheets for data cleaning is a common task done by data analysts to handle structured and unstructured data. It’s great to know that such content is being taught in this course!

2. Provides an Abundance of Learning Resources

Throughout the entire certification program, I found myself going through many external resources and links from useful resources provided through the readings.

Most of them come from credible sources such as programming documentation, instructional guides, community groups, and online portfolios.

For example, here’s a link to how to “Format numbers as percentages” on Excel from Microsoft’s official support page. I got it from one of the online links in the readings.

Some of these useful resources can be a good supplement to the video lectures in the course. One of the links even brought me to a YouTube video about sorting data in Excel! This is a must-know for data-cleaning tasks!

Curious to know how the Google Certification compares with the IBM Data Analyst Professional Certificate?

Then you should read my full comparison article!

3. Provides Good Certification Credentials

What you see above is an example of the Professional Certificate (given by Coursera) that you will receive when you complete all 8 courses of the certification.

It’s a screengrab of my certificate!

Looks pretty neat, right?

This is something you can look forward to when you complete yours!

In case you’re wondering, you won’t need to pass any separate exam to get the Google Data certificate, only just the course’s quizzes.

For those new to Coursera, it’s a massive open online course platform that hosts many other online certification programs from well-known institutions.

Being one of the most well-known online platforms for learning skills, I would definitely say that having your certificate verifiable on Coursera is a great thing!

Also, who doesn’t know about Google? Having a certificate from Google is probably one of the largest reasons why you’re here, just like me!

Having a Professional Certificate from Google would surely be impressive to employers.

In fact, this certificate provides some really great credentials that can be included in a junior data analyst resume.

I even received a link to verify the certificate on Coursera that’s accessible even after I cancel my subscription to Coursera Plus for this certificate.

You can check out mine at this link here.

My Accreditation Badge by Credly

In addition to the verifiable Professional Certificate available on Coursera, you’ll also obtain an Accreditation Badge, issued by Credly.

Credly is a digital credentials platform for verifying skills, and they currently partner with Coursera to display and issue badges based on certificates earned.

In our case, since the certificate is hosted on Coursera, a similar badge will be presented to you.

What a way to celebrate and mark the end of your course!

If you’re curious to know of some other certificates that I’d personally recommend, check out my other article on analytics certificates here!

This might also be pretty useful for those aspiring data analysts applying for data analyst roles!

4. Has a Well-Structured Program to Ensure Learning Progress

Being hosted on Coursera’s online platform, this certificate program ensures that you have a premium learning experience through a well-structured program.

Why would I say that?

Let’s have a look at the course content breakdown in terms of hours.

Breakdown of Entire Course Content by Hours

	Course Name	Approx. Total Time to Complete	Video Lecture Time
1	Foundations: Data, Data, Everywhere	20 hours	156 minutes
2	Ask Questions to Make Data-Driven Decisions	17 hours	149 minutes
3	Prepare Data for Exploration	22 hours	140 minutes
4	Process Data from Dirty to Clean	22 hours	213 minutes
5	Analyze Data to Answer Questions	23 hours	193 minutes
6	Share Data Through the Art of Visualization	23 hours	179 minutes
7	Data Analysis with R Programming	37 hours	213 minutes
8	Google Data Analytics Capstone: Complete a Case Study	10 hours	51 minutes
	Total	174 hours	21 hours, 33 Minutes

As you can see from the table above, you’ll be going through a proper 8-course program, with each course covering topics from the 6 phases of data analytics and data analysis, which is pretty comprehensive for someone learning data analytics for the first time.

This is especially useful for tougher topics like R programming, which can be tough for those coding for the first time. A good structure can really be a good motivator for learning.

Each course has an average of 20 hours of learning and an average of 175 minutes of video lectures. Based on my own experience, I found this ample time for me to absorb all the knowledge required.

Varied Learning Content

The course has many styles of learning content for anyone to learn from! Here are the different types found in the course:

• Videos
• Readings
• Ungraded External Tool: Qwiklab
• Discussion Prompts
• Practice Quizzes
• Quizzes

The courses provide a varied style of content delivery, which is well structured according to Coursera’s hosting platform.

The table below shows the breakdown of the number of content pieces for each content type, according to the courses, do check it out!

Email Reminders to Motivate You

There are even email reminders from Coursera to help keep you motivated and up to speed with the recommended completion timeline!

5. Includes Access to Career Resources

At the end of the entire certification program, Google career certificate graduates be given 3 main career resources which can be useful for their job applications.

Here they are:

1. Google Certs Coursera Job Platform
2. Careercircle
3. Big Interview

Here’s what they showed me when I completed the completion survey:

Careercircle

This is the career site that was recommended to me by Google after completing the certificate. It’s a portal that connects you to US employers, so if you currently live in the US, this might be a good resource for you.

Big Interview

Another useful resource for learners of the Google Certificate is a 1 year-long access to Big Interview. This platform provides you with interview prep resources like videos on improving your interviews, practice interview tools, and more!

This might be potentially handy if you’re looking to improve your interviewing skills to land that data analyst or data scientist job.

6. Includes a Capstone Data Project

At the end of all the learning content lies a capstone challenge in course #8. This capstone data project is an optional project recommended by this certificate that will cover all the data skills from the previous lessons.

Learners can choose from either Case 1, which is a guided project from Google, or Case 2, which is a self-sourced data project.

Either way, you’ll be looking at improving and consolidating your knowledge pretty well through this capstone project!

Also, this can be a great addition to your project portfolios!

Curious to know how long a data science project can take?

Check out my other blog post over here.

7. Includes Access to Learning Community

Each course is broken down into weekly community discussion threads that are actively used by the learning community of the certificate.

With discussion prompts throughout each lesson guiding the forum discussions, this can be a great platform to get to know other like-minded data learners just like you!

Related Questions

Here are some bonus questions that you might find helpful when researching this certificate!

Is the Google Data Analytics Certificate Worth The Cost?

The Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate is worth the cost of USD $49/month because of the accreditations, flexibility, and career opportunities it provides. Compared to other similar certifications, it is a cheaper option without compromising quality content.

This certification definitely brings so much to your data career because of the value it provides upon completion.

Let’s have a deeper look into why I would say that this certificate is worth the cost.

Price Comparisons

	Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate	IBM Data Analyst Professional Certificate	Cloudera Certified Data Analyst	Microsoft Certified: Data Analyst Associate
Type	Online Course	Online Course	Certification Exam	Certification Exam
Career Resources	Certificate holder-only career portals	None	None	None
Cost/month	$49/month	$49/month	–	–
Approximate Duration	2 months	6 months	–	–
Total Price	$147	$294	$295	$165

Although not the cheapest, the Google Certificate is able to provide a structured learning program and other useful career resources after completing the program.

The certificate has great flexibility through online content delivery, lots of career resources after completion, and relatively cheap prices!

Nonetheless, all these data analytics courses are equally good!

Want to know more about the IBM Data Analyst Certificate and why I think it’s also worth it?

Read this article here!

How Much Does the Google Data Analytics Certificate Cost?

The Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate costs USD $98. The certificate is charged based on 2 ways: a monthly subscription at $49/month and a fixed cost of $98 for 3 months or $117 for 6 months. However, since most learners complete it in 3 months, the certificate will cost $147 in total.

Check out a quick summary table of the cost I calculated below!

Certificate Completion Time	Total Estimated Cost (USD)
7 days	$0 (Free trial, no certificate)
1 Month	$49
2 Months	$98
3 Months	$147 (Best estimate)
4 Months	$196
5 Months	$245
6 Months	$294

Although the approximate timeline for learning is 6 months, the cost can be much lesser depending on your learning speed.

Due to the subscription model of this certificate, the faster you go, the less you pay!

The cost price of the certificate may be reduced if you buy through a promotional affiliate link too! So do look out for that from your favorite data science writer/YouTuber.

Else, you can use mine here (affiliate link).

Coursera Scholarship

If the price for the certificate is too steep, you might consider applying for financial aid through the Coursera Scholarship! This is a program that gives some financial help to those who satisfy their criteria.

How Much Did I Spend on the Google Certificate?

I spent a total of $78 USD to complete the Google Certificate. I paid for the first 2 months at $39 USD each after my 7-day trial period ended. This was based on the old pricing, though. It currently costs $49/month for the subscription.

Can You Actually Get A Job From Completing This Certificate?

Holders of the Professional Certificate from Google should be able to get a data analyst job upon completion of the certificate program. Although jobs are not guaranteed upon completion of the certificate, essential data skillsets taught in the course fit most entry-level associate data analyst position requirements.

To further prove my point above, let me share with you more about a real success story I came to know of!

So here’s how it went:

After I completed my certificate, I decided to join the learning community on a Linkedin group. In one of the posts by a fellow member, it was shared that the program has helped him is his data analyst skills to land his first job as an analyst!

How amazing is that!

What an amazing success story right? You can check it out at this link over here.

If you’re interested, you can also check out the Linkedin group at this link: Linkedin Group

Coursera Impact Report 2023

If you’re looking at evaluating the career success of previous certificate holders, a good place to look is on Coursera itself!

Here’s the data:

Based on data from the Coursera Impact Report 2023, 1 in 4 learners who took the Professional Certificate got a new entry-level job.

Although this data mainly refers to the result of the IT Support Professional Certificate, I strongly believe that the results will be similar for the Data Analytics Professional Certificate as well.

How Long Will It Take to Complete the Certificate?

It will take 2-3 months, on average to complete the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate. This will vary depending on having previous data background, learning speeds, and hours committed per day. Although Google suggests a 6 month completion time, most finish the program earlier.

The learning process is different for all individuals because of additional commitments like work and family.

And that’s fine!

Not everyone will be able to complete the whole program within the average time of 2-3 months. Even Google understands that and suggested a solid 6 month completion time!

Because this course includes R programming, do read my post on how long it takes to learn R over here.

If you’re curious about how long it will take to learn Tableau, check out my other post here.

If you have previous knowledge or work experience in some aspects of data like spreadsheets, you might be able to move faster and complete the program ahead of time.

However, this certification should not be rushed because of the importance of getting the foundations right.

How Many Hours Does the Google Certificate Take?

The Google Certification takes 174 hours to complete. The certificate includes 7 courses with an average of 20 hours of learning each. The certificate also features about 21 hours’ worth of video lecture content. and an average of 175 minutes of video lectures for each course.

How Long Did Other Learners Take to Complete the Google Certification?

Again, I took to Linkedin to find out more from others about how long others took to complete their certificates to help you better estimate your time and cost!

Here’s the post I made in the same group.

Here are the results! As it turns out, most learners took about 2-3 months to complete the entire certification program.

How Long Did I Take to Finish the Google Certificate?

I took a total of 9 weeks to complete the entire Professional Certificate program. This took much a much shorter time than suggested by Google because I was waiting to start my first full-time job after completing college.

I had spare time on my hands and could go faster!

As you can see from the screengrab below, the approximate time suggested by Google was 37 weeks to finish up all courses.

Who Should Take This Certificate?

Aspiring data or business analysts who need the flexibility of self-paced online learning should take the Google Certification. However, the certificate is also a good refresher on topics across the data analytics field.

The content delivery method of the certificate is fully online and is perfect for those who need flexible learning time. These include those currently working a full-time day job, full-time students, and stay-home parents.

I would recommend this course to anyone who aspires to be a data analyst and has the spare time to build up a solid credential for their portfolio.

Who Should Not Take This Certificate?

Individuals who only want physical classes for learning, those who intend to learn Python from the course, or do not aspire to be data professionals should not take the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate.

Due to the online nature of the program, traditional classroom settings are not available. This means that individuals who only want physical classes for their learning should not be taking this certificate.

Anyone who is intending to learn Python should not take this course as it is not covered.

Also, any learner that is unable to commit many hours of learning should avoid this certificate for the time being because of the intense time-heavy content of the course.

Is The Google Data Analyst Certificate Easy?

The Google Certificate is not easy. It covers a wide variety of data analytics topics new learners would not find easy. It requires constant effort in learning. However, the Google Data Analytics Certificate is worth getting for its in-depth content.

Is The Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate Hard?

The Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate is hard. The Google Data Analytics Certificate covers topics in data analytics that first-time learners would find hard. It requires dedication to learn by watching lectures and coding exercises. However, the certificate is worth getting for its rigorous curriculum.

Are Google Certifications Worth It?

Google Certifications are worth it. Google Certifications typically have well-structured courses with helpful video lectures. These certificates are becoming more well-recognized among employers than traditional degrees. Although Google Certificates are delivered online, they are priced affordably at USD $49/month.

Thinking of trying out other options like bootcamps instead of this online course and want to know if they’re worth it? Read more on my answer here.

How Do I Get Started With The Google Certificate?

You can get started by enrolling and starting your free trial of the Google Data Analytics Specialization through the link below. Or you can enroll for a Coursera Plus Membership, which includes 90% of all specializations and courses, including the Google Certificate, at $59 USD/month.

Final Thoughts

This is a great course for beginners who want a broad-based course on data analytics that covers a good basic introduction to both soft and technical skills, all for an affordable price of $49 USD/month.

I would say that this course is well worth it! If you’re looking to start your data analyst career or transition into analytics, the Google Certificate is a great way to start!

I hope this Google Data Analytics Certification review has been helpful to you; thanks for reading!