The analytics training landscape in India is changing very rapidly and for the right reasons. There is a huge talent gap to solve for. The U.S. alone is expected to have a shortfall of 150,000 data scientists by 2018. The number for India would also be similar.
People are inventing and discovering new ways to try and bridge this skill gap in the industry. As a result, not surprisingly, many new online and offline courses are emerging for people to upgrade their skills to match the industry demand.
In the last few months, we received several queries regarding the PG Diploma in Data Analytics Program being offered by UpGrad and IIIT-Bangalore. The course has been running for more than a year now and I thought it would be good to review their material and publish my review to help people make the right career decision.
Like other reviews which we have done in the past, we interacted with various stakeholders across the chain to review the course. This includes Management, Faculty, past students and current students of the program. This time too, I reached out to the UpGrad team and asked them for access to the course material and they happily obliged.
While the material is provided by UpGrad – all views expressed in the article are my own.
When I first came across the UpGrad & IIIT-B offering, it looked like just another offering from a top-tier education institute in India, aimed at working professionals. I thought that, like most of the other competing programs out there – they would take 2 – 3 years to learn about the industry before they get the program right. Thankfully, I was wrong.
When I interacted with the UpGrad team, a couple of things stood out compared to other institutes / courses I have reviewed in past:
Since the program is run online, I wasn’t sure how the partnership with IIIT-Bangalore works. Hence, I spent some time understanding the model. IIIT-B and UpGrad collaborate on every aspect of the program including curriculum creation, program development, program delivery, career support etc. The learners receive a PG Diploma in Data Analytics from IIIT-B post successful completion.
This is a unique programs launched by IIIT-B. The other programs that IIITB offers are full time, offline programs providing degrees such as M. Tech and PhD. This program, despite being online, has tried to keep most of the features of the university’s offline experience, such as a robust credit structure in place.
I was happy that UpGrad was applying this selection criteria instead of accepting most of the applications they get. Hopefully, that should improve the experience of the people enrolled in the course.
The PGDDA has two ongoing batches of 300 and 500 learners. The program boasts a healthy mix of individuals drawn from a variety of backgrounds and bringing in a wealth of prior experience.
All the qualified learners are expected to go through a preparatory program which covers some mathematical – such as matrix, linear algebra – and technical prerequisites such as R, SQL, Tableau, Excel, Python.
The 11 month PG Diploma program is a 36 credit program which comprises 7 courses (please check this on course website as it might change over time). The first 6 courses are:
All of these courses carry 4 credits each. The 7th course is a 3 month long capstone project, which carries 12 credits, and has been developed in collaboration with various companies/Industry professionals.
This definitely looks comprehensive for an 11 month program – but let us look at the content a bit more closely.
The interface of the UpGrad portal (LMS) looks good and intuitive to use. You can see a summary of your progress on the course screen. Additionally, there is a discussion portal (the participation in which is counted towards evaluation) and a browser based coding window. You can access past lectures and industry interactions here too.
The videos were of high quality and contained interesting story lines. The participant needs to watch the entire video before unlocking the exercises and moving ahead. I personally am not a big fan of this feature as I like to see the content selectively. But, I can understand why UpGrad decided to keep it this way to enforce the participation.
There is a sharp focus on preparing the learners for jobs in the industry. The support provided to learners is on the following front:
My interaction with Prof. Tricha from IIIT Bangalore gave me an inside view about the efforts which have gone in creating the course and some of the challenges which the team is working on. We also discussed how the assessment was different for this course compared to other courses. Interestingly, the assessment includes grading activities on the discussion portal. Here is the weightage of various activities in the course assessment:
UpGrad has partnered with companies and senior individual contributors from the industry to create and deliver this program. They have experts from Uber, Fractal Analytics, Genpact, Viacom, Tata iQ etc. who work closely with them to develop the case studies. These experts are also involved in delivering lectures and providing industry perspective to the learners.
Overall the industry engagement during the program would be around 40%. This can be experienced by learners in the form of recorded lectures, live sessions and even mentorship sessions. This link contains the list of faculty who are part of this program.
During my interaction with industry faculty members, they told me that they are very excited about what UpGrad is creating and have high confidence in the team. They said that the willingness to try new things, really stands out.
The students were overall happy about their learning and also the effort that was put in by the UpGrad team. They said that the team was highly approachable. The students mentioned that the course is fairly intensive and their schedule ends up being hectic – all for a good cause though.
The students appreciated the connect with industry experts and the effort from UpGrad team. They also suggested that having a full time instructor with industry experience might further improve their learning.
Manshul was working as a consultant at TCS when he decided to take a plunge into analytics after 9+ years of experience.
Initially I was quite apprehensive about the program quality and given my 9-year experience, how would I keep pace with young people in my batch. But my experience has only been rewarding. From program content to networking to career support, this program offers an end-to-end solution. I got placed in Opera Solutions as Sr. Data Engineer through UpGrad IIIT-B career support.
-Manshul Goel, Sr. Data Engineer, Opera Solutions.
Sajal Roychowdhury was working with Amazon as a risk analyst and then transitioned to Shopclues as a Business Analyst. He enjoyed the peer to peer interaction during the program.
It is brilliant to collaborate and learn with others even though it is an online program. IIIT-B is a good brand to have and the curriculum of the program is solid.
-Sajal Roychowdhary, Business Analyst, Shopclues
This course is the right fit for people with experience who want to understand / experience analytics, but cannot / do not want to take time out for attending an offline course. The UpGrad platform has been created after a lot of careful consideration, research and testing. The team is dedicated to improving the platform regularly.
The content is of high quality and is delivered by experienced faculty. I can say very confidently that among all the courses coming up in India, the UpGrad & IIITB course has evolved the fastest and will continue to do so.
While all the efforts are in the right direction, it will become clear in the next 6 months how the industry accepts those who have graduated from this course.
I enjoyed talking to the UpGrad team and would thank them for providing me unrestricted access to their faculty / students. I loved their focus on the platform, the attitude of the team to get things done, quality of their content and the innovation they are bringing in.
What would I want to see more? I would want them to bring on-board a full time specialist for the course. Also, the statistics about the placements would only be available in next 6 – 12 months.
Disclosure: This sponsored post has been written by Analytics Vidhya on behalf of, and with inputs from UpGrad. All opinions expressed in this post are entirely those of Analytics Vidhya.
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I really want to know if they have been able to place people with less than 1 year work experience. Any idea about that?
I am a student of their first batch & am sad to say that the placements are not up to the mark. Not even 10% of the batch are placed so far. Most of those who got placed had some background/experience related to analytics. But I do agree that they have a very good curriculum planned & the faculty are up to the mark. My advice is to think twice before investing such a huge amount of money. I have attended a number of interviews and none of the interviewers didn't pay any special attention to this course. What they mainly look for is your knowledge, passion & experience irrespective of the the method you gained it.
Hi Kunal, I am a Geophysicist by profession working in oil & gas industry for last 14 years. I love my job but unfortunately due to several geopolitics and other factors oil industry is pretty unstable for last few years and it doesn't seem recovering in coming few years , though I still have my job. But I wish to do a business analytics or data analytics course. there are plenty of them. which one I could choose. One more thing , after spending a long time in one stream, although as a geophysicist we also play with data only. can I shift my career in analytics. Please Guide. Ajay
I have no prior experience in IT industry and I am choosing C-DAC for PG diploma in big data analytics . I have working knowledge of R, Python I also have conceptual knowledge of C, machine learning and statistics. I chose C-DAC because of extensive curriculum and relatively low expenses. I also have option of Up-grad in front of me. Please,please share your opinion on my choice. Thank you.
I want to know if there have been any good offers for people with 9+ yrs experience also is there any in depth coverage as lot of topics are getting covered in a short duration. Will employers give any value to this degree ?
Shashank, I would not call this as short duration - the program is 11 months. I do agree that there is a lot of ground to cover and you have to be prepared for hectic 11 months ahead. From employers perspective, they would look at the projects you have done and what you have learnt more than the degree. Hope that helps. Regards, Kunal
Hi Kunal, Thanks for this review, I really wish if you could have thrown some more light on the course content, just listing out the course title doesn't excite me enough.
Akhtar, Thanks for asking the question. I understand where you are coming from. Happy to share more details on the content. Here are a few more pointers - 1. All the videos were high quality and UpGrad / IIIT-Bangalore team had clearly put in efforts to make topics easy to understand. 2. There were case studies from various companies embedded into the course work to provide people practical exposure while they are taking the course. 3. They have a few more additions planned on bringing an interface to code through browser directly in coming days. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask and I will answer them to the best of my knowledge. Hope that helps. Regards, Kunal
A few more points, they cover the below areas/tools 1. Statistics 2. SQL 3. Tableau 4. Machine Learning - Regression, Classification, Clustering, 5. Big Data fundamentals (Hadoop/Hive/HDFS etc) in a nutshell 6. A bit of Spark 7. Python (optional) 8. Domain elective (BFS/Health Care/eCommerce)
Good for learning and to add extra skills to ur profile but program should think and provide options for students to connect with IIITB professors to take advantage of their exp. More Industries connect session should be provided to bring rigor within students which would help them to understand current and future market expectation and skills required !!
Hos is pg diploma course in data science in manipal prolearn,it is worth for the fees?
Hi Kunal, I have 10 years of experience in telecom wireless domain mainly on the UE layer 1 side.I completed data science (R,SAS and Excel)course from Simplilearn and it's been an year since I completed this course but still finding it hard to switch to data analytics domain as the minimum ask for any data science opening is 2years. Is it so hard to switch domain for people like us ? Was thinking of enrolling for IIIT-B program but not sure if it's really going to help.Please share your thoughts on this.
I am a 2017 passed out student in Mathematics and looking forward to make a career in analytics. This is my interest area but I have no work experience. Will this course be useful for me or is it specifically meant for working professionals?
can someone shed more light on this course:- 1. Is the course more technical or mix of "technical and application" 2. is the 3 month capstone part of 11 months 3. Are the recruiters valuing this degree?
i want join pg course in big data for 11 month
Hi, I am a fresher currently working on c# and I am interested in learning data analytics. Is it worth for me to take up this? If I do, will I get the good placement opportunities after this?
Sir I want to about Edureka Masters program of Big Data and Data analytics? Is there curricullum good? Are they worth for money?
My experience with the course is Very DISAPPOINTING ,It's very superficial. Ideally you would expect to see a lot of case studies ,to understand the topic but the case studies are just provided as an assignment without providing any practice case studies to work with and then you are rated on these assignments which you are supposed to outperform just by understanding the concept. The concepts explained in videos are also of very mediocre level.I still had to visit YouTube or Google for better understanding and to get some more practice. Career support is a ......hmmmph My suggestion would be to consider udemy/edx/coursera/udacity course that would be way cheaper than this course and are much effective because you would also have direct discussion with the instructor. You could also choose from plethora of course options.
Hi Kunal, Can you please share your view on PG course in Software Development recently launched by UpGrad and IIIT-B?
Almost all the course ware is available for free. I read the above comments , Even with platforms such as Kaggle and other online competotions one can get a business problem to work on. Further to quote yourself "From employers perspective, they would look at the projects you have done and what you have learnt more than the degree." Now my question is, does one aspiring to get into data science/artificial intelligence job profile really need to pursue such a paid course to make an entry into this domain? Or, self learning can get him equally good chances to change his or her profile?
please let me know if the course is AICTE approved?. How it is different from any certification program?
To me, it sounds very costly to spend 2.75L on a Diploma in Analytics. Moreover, the first 40% courses are freely available on numerous sites including AV (referring to DS specialization) NPTEL, Udacity, Udemy, edX etc. and those are of good quality. Moreover the placement doesn't seem to be up to the mark. Paying that hefty at least makes no sense to me. Any other good courses, that you can suggest? Else I'll continue with the AV's DS plan for 18 :)
Hii, I am thinking to take Data science course I am only 1 yr exp in automation can you tell is it will be a good choice and for me what will be future scope... And I get to interact with alumni who took the course,, is they got any big offers.
Thanks for the review Kunal. I was trying to find the authenticity of the program and a review on Analytics Vidhya really serves the purpose.
Is ML/AI PGP course by Upgrad and IIIT Bangalore has been Recognized & Approved by UGC or AICTE or other? And how “Post Graduate Diploma in Machine Learning and AI” Degree from IIIT Bangalore, will add the value unlike other PG degree.