Since we get a lot of queries around, which business analytics course or university is best by many of our readers, we decided to review one of the most sought after courses in the industry – the Business Analytics Certificate Program by Great Lakes Institute of Management. We have consistently ranked Great Lakes as the leading school in India providing analytics education.

Recently, Great lakes ventured into the heated up online learning space through the partner organization – Great Learning. Great Learning is an online and blended learning platform designed to empower working professionals to develop relevant competencies and accelerate their career progression.

Business Analytics Certificate Program is amongst the first programmes to be launched on this platform. We first spoke about the same at its launch here. Participants are expected to take roughly 6 months to complete this Program, which involves 160 hours of learning comprised of about 100 hours of self-learning, 40 hours of instructor led webinars and another 20 hours of assessments.

Now, this program sparks our interest for some very particular reasons. Firstly, it has a biggie like Great Lakes backing it, which has already proved its mettle in the Indian analytics education arena. Today, there are more analytics professionals being trained by Great Lakes than all other B-schools combined in India.

Secondly, not many universities provide online analytics courses, further, given the online nature, this course does not even have a location constraint. So, this course can be taken up by anyone worldwide.

However, the real story has to be quality and experience. So, we thought of looking at this course a little deeper and provide our perspective on it.

First things first, the course is being taught by B-school faculty, which is rare in online learning. We found that the course content has been tailored by expert faculty and practitioners to address the current industry needs. Thus, candidates develop the ability to process data problems using analytics and relate them to the business aspects.

Though one can find B-schools in US taking up analytics courses on ‘Coursera’, what Great Lakes have done is very unique from India perspective. Besides optimizing their academic brand and faculty strength of their online channel, Great Lakes has an online “Learning Management System” that hosts all the content, including online lectures, webinar recordings, reading material and assignments. But, what gives it a plus point is the fact, this material is accessible to the students for the next 3 years, even after the course completion. Further, participants can also access the LMS using the Great Learning mobile app.

Moreover, the program is a combination of self-paced and live virtual online classes. The classes are interactive and are conducted by analytics experts in a virtual classroom. These lectures are recorded, this enables the participants to review the material or to make up for any missed Q & A sessions. Further, ‘Live Webinar Q&A Sessions’ are conducted by analytics mentors. This allows the participants to resolve any questions or doubts from the Instructor-led sessions. Additionally, there are ‘Pre-recorded video lectures’ as well, that can be viewed at any time and as many times as the participant wants. Surely, these are noticeable differentiators vs other online courses on analytics.

Participants:

Since, this certificate course fits in with the industry requirements for working professionals (to hone their analytic skills) as well as for fresher’s (to build their career in analytics and ace their job interviews); typically, a lot of working professionals from varied backgrounds such as IT, Management, Entrepreneurs, Engineers, etc. with a few years of work experience join this course.

Curriculum:

Business Analytics Certificate Program has a well-rounded curriculum. The students are given hands on experience by working on analytical tools such as SAS language, R and Advanced Excel. Moreover, they are exposed to various industry domains such as Financial Analytics, Retail Analytics, Web and Social Media Analytics which helps them decide their career path further.

The program begins with an Introduction to Analytics then moves on to cover topics such as- Basic Analytics Tools, Fundamentals of Statistics for Business Analytics, Advanced Excel Analysis, Data Mining using Decision Trees, Data Mining using Clustering in SAS and R, Time Series Forecasting, Predictive Modelling – Logistic Regression using SAS, Predictive Modelling – Logistic Regression using R and lastly, the Applications of analytics.

Thus, overall, it is a well-structured program and we believe that it maximizes the learning curve of the candidates in the industrial context.

For more information, please visit: http://bit.ly/1ST3Ofx