Google is offering a new certification for information technology pros interested in carving out a career in big data niche.

Called the Google Certified Professional Data Engineer program, the new certification is aimed at professionals with experience in tasks such as programming data pipelines, tuning databases, creating reports and performing statistical analysis on company data. The certification demonstrates their competency with Google’s key big data technologies, such as BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow and Cloud Machine Learning.

Rochana Golani, Google’s head of curriculum and certification, said the data engineer plays a key role in helping organizations to modernize the way they use big data to shape decision making. Google-certified data engineers will be able to play a fundamental role in shaping business outcomes through their analysis of data and building of statistical models to support decision making, Golani said. In addition, they will play a central role in the automation and simplification of business processes using machine learning.

“Data Engineers will build, maintain and troubleshoot data processing systems that are secure, reliable and scalable, and this certification establishes a trusted standard of proficiency for the role,” Golani wrote in a blog post.

The new certification is the first of several that Google is planning to launch under its newly announced Google Cloud Certification Program. To date, Google has previously announced two other certification programs – Cloud Architect and G Suite Administrator.

Launching soon, the Cloud Architect program is designed to show proficiency in skills such as designing and planning cloud architectures, managing and provisioning infrastructure for clouds, and cloud security and compliance expertise. As for the G Suite Administrator certification course, this is aimed at demonstrating individual’s proficiency with Google’s suite of cloud platform technologies. Those who take the program will be assessed for their ability to handle tasks like creating, deleting and administering users; configuring settings policies and reporting, and ensuring security of cloud domains, Google said. The course is currently offered in both English and Japanese.

Golani said those who have hands-on experience with the Google Cloud Platform should be well prepared for the new data engineer certification. To help out those interested in taking the course, the company has produced an exam guide detailing the skills necessary to acquire the data engineer certification, which they can use to assess their readiness for the exam.

“Increasingly, data drives decisions, and there’s a huge demand for technical professionals who can support decision-makers by extracting value from business data,” Golani said.

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