Hi I am Maximo from Argentina. I am currently studying at high school and was looking for a way to get a job in AI without a degree. I then came up with the GCP ML Engineer certificate and saw it was really promising. I would like to know from others if this certificate would help me get a job in ML as a high schooler or if I would still need to obtain a bachelor’s degree.
Thank you.
Hello Maximo, I believe the certificate will help you to obtain many skills and with those it will be easier for you to find a job fin ML. Even tho a degree has its value, the most important criteria is whether you can perform the job.
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I really appreciate your answer ihearu. Just to get a better insight of the certificate, do you know someone who has done it?
You are welcome. I’m afraid I do not, but if you put “GCP ML Engineer certificate” in LinkedIN search it will come up with folks who have done it and you can reach out and talk to someone who completed the certification that way.
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I was a tech startup founder and CEO in the days before the interweb when it was difficult to assess candidates. Degrees were a useful filter for time constrained people like me to cut down the number of resumes to read. These days, while a degree or certificate provides some useful information about a candidate’s journey, I would put much more weight on their digital exhaust on github or kaggle etc. I want to see what types of code the candidate claims to have written, and what types of data sets they have exposure to. I want to see if the code is well organized, suitably documented, and if it appears that best practices were followed in areas such as data cleansing and exploratory data analysis. I want to see that the variables and functions are appropriately named, and the functions actually do what their names imply. A degree or certification might help you get through some automated or human gatekeepers, but really what would matter to me is that you have created and can explain artifacts relevant to the type of position your are pursuing.
One approach might be to look at the functional areas of the certificate and map them to projects you can perform. Then you accomplish several things at once. First, you develop your knowledge and skills. Second, you build out your portfolio. Finally, you are prepared to pass the exams since you have more than just ‘book’ knowledge of the material.
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I agree 100% with @ai_curious. From my point of view as a developer and researcher, the tidiness and good documentation says a lot about a project and their contributors. When you really get into technical stuff, that matters way more than a X course certificate.
Nonetheless, this kinds of degrees are quite useful as an introductory help to a specific sector.
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