How to Learn Data Visualization and Get Certified for Free?
Learn Tableau and Get Certified Without Paying As a Student!
Background
The phrase ‘Data-Driven Decision Making’ has been rising in popularity lately across job descriptions listings companies make. But what does it mean?
Data-driven decision-making is the process of utilizing data to validate a course of action before doing it.
— Tim Stobierski from Harvard Business School Online
However, thousands or millions of data rows are really hard to interpret and they cannot communicate the hidden insights clearly, which is the reason why you need to learn Data Visualization, the graphical representation of data (Tableau, 2022). In fact, according to research conducted by LinkedIn Learning (2019), skills relating to data analytics and data storytelling have been the trending hard skills learned by most college fresh graduates.
What is Tableau?
For those who are new to the Data field, Microsoft Excel may be your go-to data analysis tool, therefore, let me introduce you to Tableau. In short, Tableau is one of the widely-used analytics platforms which has a diverse choice of data sources, visualizations types, and Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning capabilities.
Tableau offers a free version of the platform, Tableau Public, but it has limitations compared to the $70 USD/month product, Tableau Desktop.
How to get Tableau Desktop for free?
Luckily for students, Tableau has an Academic Program where they offer one-year licenses, which of course, can be renewed annually if you are still an active student!
To register, simply go to their website and register yourself by filling in your personal and school information.
Shortly after successful registration, you will get an email with the subject ‘Your Tableau Desktop Product Key is Enclosed’, containing the Product Key and steps to download the software. Congratulations! You can start exploring the software to be the next data rockstar.
How to get Certified for free?
There are numerous ways to learn Tableau’s functionalities online, such as through reading Medium posts, watching Youtube videos, online courses, and boot camps. Tableau itself has its e-learning online self-paced courses, which again, are not free for the public to access. However, Tableau provides students with this too and the Access Key can be found in the same email.
A major advantage to this course compared to external courses are the Learning Paths and the Curriculum provided directly from Tableau which offers certifications upon completion, perfect to showcase your newly-acquired skill!
Conclusion
In summary, as the job-seeking competition gets tougher over time, we need to be more proactive to learn in-demand skills, one of which is Data Visualization. Regardless of the number of videos and certificates you have earned, do keep in mind that the most important factor is the number of real practice hours invested!
For any inquiries, I can be contacted via LinkedIn. Hope that this tip will be useful to many students interested to be Data-Driven :)
