This self-paced online Data Analyst Career Certificate Program provides you a university career certificate and the knowledge, practical experience, competency and confidence to qualify for high-paying data analyst jobs.

Data Analysts are professionals who collect, process, and perform analyses on enterprises’ huge quantities of information to help them make better and faster business decisions. Virtually all enterprises now have reached “data overload” and need data analysts to help them make sense of massive amounts of data. According to Indeed Inc., there are currently more than 186,000 data analytics job openings in the United States, and data analysts can earn up to nearly $104,000 annually.

This program is suitable for you if you are seeking to enhance your career or looking for a new career in a high-demand occupation. You will learn how to do it all in data analytics: from cleaning data to presenting it in visual form, performing qualitative and quantitative analysis of data, interpreting data and making predictions.

This online program utilizes active, self-paced, Learn-By-Doing training. This innovative approach provides bite-sized lessons, requiring you to show you have mastered each concept by completing exercises before moving on to the next module. This competency-based approach builds knowledge as well as practical experience, both of which are needed to qualify for data analyst job openings.

This training program takes approximately 360 to 400 hands-on hours. You are assigned a coach who prepares a personalized roadmap and training timeline for you, and then works with you for the entire duration of the training. Because your training is self-paced and individualized to your schedule, you are able to build a consistent training routine with your coach that does not interfere with your work and family commitments.

Trainees who successfully complete the program receive a Data Analyst Career Certificate from Idaho State University and walk away with the professional portfolio necessary to demonstrate ability and qualify for job openings.

Program Prerequisites:

You must successfully complete a two-hour online assessment to gain acceptance to this program.

Program Components:

To begin with, given that Data Analysts work extensively with numbers, you must know some math. If, in consultation with your coach, it is determined that you need a basic middle school level math refresher, our free optional Workplace Math course provides hands-on review and practice to bring you up to speed. After completing this course, you are ready to take the ACT WorkKeys Applied Math exam, which is highly valued by employers.

Data Analyst training begins with SQL Fundamentals, where you will learn about data and databases, with emphasis on Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs), which are used in virtually all industries and organizations to store data about employees, products, services, inventory, financial transactions, etc. You will learn how a RDBMS works, how to make basic queries, use aggregate functions, create and manage tables, and how to use basic joins.

You then take Advanced SQL where you learn more about RDBMSs that tend to be large, complex and messy (they often contain damaged and/or incomplete data). To successfully handle such databases, training continues with this course, which teaches you how to use conditional expressions; work with text, including search-and-replace operations, formulate subqueries and advanced joins; and how to use SQL functions.

You continue your Data Analyst training with a comprehensive Data Literacy course, in which you learn all about:

• Data sources
• Data types
• Data relationships
• Data structures
• Sorting, filtering and grouping, data and
• Other fundamental techniques of Data Analytics.

You learn basic and advanced spreadsheet operations, including data visualization and analytics, using Google Sheets and Google Data Studio. You learn how to create interactive dashboards and reports. You also learn the fundamentals of data mining, statistical methods, data analysis, and data visualization. Finally, you learn about data governance, quality, and controls. Upon completing this training, you understand how data is acquired, stored, manipulated, analyzed, and used to make better business decisions.

This training is followed by a Capstone Project, in which you use all of the skills you’ve acquired and become comfortable with the work environment that you will be in in your first job. The completed project in your resume and your Data Analyst Career Certificate will show potential employers that you have the skills and experience they are looking for.

An optional CompTIA Data+ Prep Course prepares you for the CompTIA's Data+ exam, an industry-recognized certification, which adds a significant weight to your resume. You are encouraged to take the exam before starting to work on your Capstone Project.

Participation in the program requires a personal computer, high-speed internet access and an email address.