Intro
I’ve been writing on Medium for a few years now and I’ve generally stuck to writing about data analytics/engineering and mathematics so this article will be a departure from that. It’s a rant article. If you’ve been paying attention for the past few years you’ve probably seen major websites offering certifications and courses. I can list half a dozen without even trying — PluralSight, Coursera, Udemy, DataCamp, DataQuest and Udacity.
These are just the main ones I could remember. There are also now many sites dedicated to specific areas like cloud training e.g. CloudAcademy and CloudGuru as well as things like bootcamps and career coaching companies that have various business models to incentivize you to land jobs in data analytics, science or engineering. In addition there is a whole ecosystem of companies and colleges that work with these sites to promote their certifications or training as cash cows … Harvard, Stanford, UMich, MIT and IBM, Google, Facebook as well as many others.
Finally and most importantly there are dozens, if not hundreds, of influencers and tech professionals who work to promote these courses and certification through affiliate marketing and paid promotions. You can find them on every major platform from Instagram to YouTube to LinkedIn. There seems to be some dedicated pipeline that takes tech workers and turns them into tech influencers who either sell or promote these courses and certifications.
