Stanford is now offering two online graduate certifications in data mining: the Mining Massive Data Sets Graduate Certificate and the Data Mining and Applications Graduate Certificate. They cost about $10,000 each. Both are part of the statistics department and provide credits that could also be used towards a graduate degree in statistics.

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The need for “data scientists” and other workers who can handle big data problems has been increasing, but resources for training this next generation of workers has remained sparse. Here’s an infographic from Teradata which illustrates the difference between business demand and student preparedness:

There are of course issues with certification, and there are organiztions trying to build alternatives. But these certificates from Stanford outline a set of core requirements for data workers and provide the knowledge to back them up. That’s a positive step.