Skilled programers and data scientists are the highly demanded 
professionals at this time. There is a huge skill gap that is influencing the IT industry adversely. In order to provide more data scientists in the job market, Microsoft has announced its professional degree program.
There are two utterly different types of people who are seeking a rather different set of courses: first the young people who need to acquire their knowledge starting completely anew, the next category is of the mid-career professionals needing to build on their previous experience. This is the skill gap, requiring to be plugged. Here comes a series of classes in data science through edX.org, the nonprofit online learning destination founded by Harvard University and MIT.
The Data Science Curriculum is the first offering of the Microsoft Professional Degree program, a Microsoft-led initiative to help professionals grow their skills in critical fields. Launched today, the program aims to offer an “employer-endorsed, university-caliber curriculum for professionals at any stage of their career,” the company said in a press release.
While IT is the best industry, providing most promising career, data scientist is one of its highly desire profession, with more job offerings than candidates. The course is a set of nine classes and a final project. Though, all the classes can be audited for free, but if someone wants to receive credit towards the Microsoft Professional Degree, he or she must purchase a certificate for each of the 10 steps of the curriculum.
The certificate for the orientation class costs $25, the verified certificate for “Statistical Thinking for Data Science and Analytics” costs $99 and all other classes offer certificates for $49 each (the complete Data Science course costs $516).
A student has to get enrolled, in order to join the specific course sessions. On the official site of the company, there is a calendar for each class is available. A prospective student can read the detailed syllabus, examine the elective options for each unit and enroll on the edX page of the class. Each step requires a minimum of 4 to a maximum of 8 hours to be completed.
But the students need to know that, Microsoft is not the only or the first major tech company that is providing IT online education; Google and Udacity have partnered to offer an android nanodegree and other classes, and Amazon offers AWS training and certification foe advance technical classes, including a big data class.
