Search Online Business Intelligence and Analytics Courses

If you are right at the beginning of your learning journey and want to make a career in business intelligence, building a foundation in data literacy is a great place to start.

Some excellent courses on Coursera and Future learn can be self-paced and help build a solid foundation for further, more advanced study. Some good course titles and certificate programs are:

• Understand statistical testing
• Present data
• Microsoft Excel
• Business decision making

Taking short courses and getting familiar with modern software packages can help boost your CV. Having experience with Power Bi, Tableau and Google Data Studio is often mentioned as a requirement in job descriptions.

Getting your first experience as a Business Intelligence Analyst can take time and effort. There are two main routes into the profession. One, take an undergraduate degree in or related to business intelligence and gain an internship or entry-level position. Or, two, gain work experience and take self-paced courses to build a portfolio of professional certificates and practical experience. Entry-level positions in finance, accounting, and marketing are good areas to have the opportunity to develop business intelligence/ analytics skills.

It depends on your career goals, previous education and experience to guide which course is best for you. However, if you are looking to make a career change or progress in your current role, the following course titles can boost your CV and help you gain paid work as a Business intelligence analyst.

• Data Science
• Machine learning
• Data Visualization
• BI tools
• Traditional statistical methods
• Big data

Due to the popularity and industry demand for graduates, there is a wide range of online courses available. The courses can be split into a couple of main groupings- academic and professional and self-paced and tutor-led.

Universities offer academic courses in business analytics and intelligence, which take several years to complete. These online courses contain tutor lead supervised learning and have a lot of tutor-student and student-student interaction.

Self-paced distance learning courses tend to offer professional certification that demonstrates practical understanding and competency but do not carry academic credits. These courses typically consist of unsupervised learning made up of recorded lectures followed by reinforcement learning activities.

An academic online business analytics course will be broken down into tutor lead modules that get progressively more challenging as the modules progress. Each unit will generally include pre-recorded lectures and live tutor sessions. In addition, students will be required to complete a mixture of concept check activities and longer graded assignments. By the end of the programme, the learning outcomes are designed to equip graduates to become competent business intelligence analysts.

A programme may include fixed modules as well as optional units. Below are some common examples of module topics.

• Introduction to data science
• Data analysis techniques
• Predictive analytics and predictive modelling
• Data management
• Data mining and data insights
• Data modelling
• Data warehousing

Depending on the level of the certificate, applicants may have to have specific qualifications already. For example, applicants for a master’s degree typically need a relevant undergraduate qualification.

However, whatever the level of study, having good problem-solving skills and some familiarity and experience with programming languages and machine learning can be beneficial. Also, having experience working with large data sets and excel is good to have.

If you are investing in a full academic qualification online, having a standard set of questions you ask each admissions team can help you narrow down your choice. Here are our top 3 questions you should ask.

1. Ask if you can speak to a graduate who has recently completed the programme.
2. Ask what the completion rate is for the last cohort to graduate.
3. Ask when the last time the syllabus and content were refreshed.