Taras Kloba's data engineering blog

Top 8 Data Engineering certifications to find a job

22 Jun 2022

My name is Taras Kloba, and I am a Big Data Competence Manager at SoftServe. Our recruiters regularly review the lists of newly certified professionals to find new potential candidates. There is no doubt that other large companies also use this approach. Thus, I have decided to prepare a list of in-demand certifications for 2022 that may help you get a job in the field of Data Engineering.

Let's consider the main advantages of hiring certified specialists from the perspective of service companies:

  • In most cases, customers of service companies do not require additional interviews when dealing with certified engineers as they trust professional certification.

  • IT companies that hire a certain number of certified employees have the opportunity to form a partnership with such giants as GCP, Microsoft Azure, and AWS.

  • A certified specialist who has a reasonable theoretical basis in combination with an appropriate working environment will be able to implement a project by applying best practices and market standards.

However, it is essential to remember that professional certification is not a "silver bullet" that guarantees being hired as soon as you have received the appropriate training and a certificate. It is a great advantage that stands you out from other candidates, but still, there is a lot of work that remains to be done to gain practical experience.

Most companies are already using cloud services or thinking about future migration to the cloud. According to an analysis conducted by Offshore Technology in 2022, service companies include cloud computing skills in 57.5% of vacancies compared to 43% in 2021. Our analysis of Data Engineering related job descriptions for 2021 and 2022 also shows that the requirements for knowledge of cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP are listed even more frequently.

That's why I would recommend you to pay greater attention to the professional certifications of the most popular cloud providers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified Big Data — Specialty

AWS Certified Big Data Specialty certification is designed for those who perform engineering tasks involving enormous amounts of data and have at least two years of experience in using AWS technologies.

Number of questions: 65

Question types: multiple answers, multiple-choice

Time limit: 170 minutes

Cost: $300

Passing score: 750 (out of 1000)

Prep recommendations:

Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer

The Data Engineer provides decision-making by collecting, converting, and publishing data. He must design, implement, put into practice, ensure security, and monitor the operation of data processing systems. Particular attention should be paid to safety and compliance with scalability and efficiency, reliability and accuracy, as well as flexibility and portability of solutions. The Data Engineer must also use, deploy, and continuously train existing machine learning models.

Number of questions: 50

Question types: multiple answers, multiple-choice

Time limit: 120 minutes

Cost: $200

Prep recommendations:

Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Engineer Associate - DP-203

Data engineers specializing in the Azure platform help understand data through research. They implement and maintain secure and compatible data processing mechanisms using various tools and techniques. Such professionals use a variety of Azure services and programming languages to save and prepare purified and supplemented datasets for analysis.

Number of questions: 40-60

Question types: multiple answers, multiple-choice

Time limit: 150 minutes

Cost: $165

Passing score: 700 (out of 1000)

Prep recommendations: Azure for the Data Engineer

There is a number of less popular Data Engineering certifications. I recommend getting them in case of a specific request and after passing the certification of cloud providers mentioned earlier.

Lakehouse. Databricks Data Engineer Associate and Professional

This certification is intended for those who use the Databricks Lakehouse platform and related tools, such as Apache Spark, Delta Lake, MLflow, Databricks CLI, and REST API.

Number of questions: 60

Question types: multiple choice

Time limit: 120 minutes

Cost: $200

Passing score: 70%

SnowPro Advanced: Data Engineer

This certification is suitable for engineers who have at least two years of working experience in data, including the use of Snowflake. To pass the certification with flying colors, you need to demonstrate the ability to retrieve data from APIs and data lakes, convert, replicate, evaluate performance, and share data between cloud platforms.

Number of questions: 100

Question types: multiple answers, multiple-choice, true or false

Time limit: 115 minutes

Cost: $375

Passing score: 750 (out of 1000)

Cloudera Certified Professional Data Engineer

An experienced engineer who can perform the basic tasks of data acquisition, transformation, storage, and analysis in the Cloudera CDH environment will easily become a Cloudera Certified Professional Data Engineer.

Number of questions: 5-10

Question types: practical tasks

Time limit: 240 minutes

Cost: $400

Passing score: 70%

Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka

This certification is intended for developers and checks the knowledge of Confluent, Apache Kafka, and the entire Apache Kafka ecosystem.

Number of questions: 60

Question types: multiple choice

Time limit: 90 minutes

Cost: $150

Passing score: there are two options: Passed and Failed.

IBM's Data Engineering Professional Certificate

The program developed by Coursera will help you start your career as a Data Engineer. You will learn how to use technology to solve big data problems, create large-scale data processing systems, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate big data solutions. Upon completing this program, you will be supposed to take a 75-minute test to obtain a certificate.

Number of questions: 53

Question types: multiple answers, multiple-choice, true or false

Time limit: 75 minutes

Cost: $1076

Passing score: 64%

I am a certified specialist in Azure and GCP. Partially thanks to the certifications, I receive requests from recruiters to consider their vacancies from time to time. Professional certification will definitely help you improve your professional skills and show your value to employers. The demand for such specialists will undoubtedly continue growing. Let me know if you are interested in finding out which certificates are most relevant for DW/BI Engineers or Big Data Systems Engineers, and I will write an article on this topic.

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