 Is the Coursera machine learning specialization by Andrew Ng actually worth it? That's going to be the topic of this video. So everybody's freaking out about AI machine learning, deep learning with the new chat GPT that just came out. And this stuff is honestly pretty big brain. This is some of the most advanced coding that you can possibly do. But a lot of people are interested in learning this stuff now that it's starting to burst onto the mainstream scene. And one of the most well-known specializations and certificates that you can possibly get is going to be by Andrew Ng and that is the supervised machine learning regression and classification. Now this is a specialization that is a course that is one of three. So there's actually three total courses in this machine learning specialization. However, we're mostly just going to focus on the first one. Now you might be wondering who the heck is Andrew Ng and why the heck does everybody freak out about this certificate? What's so special about it? Well Andrew is a computer scientist and entrepreneur that is known for his skills in artificial intelligence and machine learning. He is the co-founder of Google Brain and he's the former vice president of Baidu and he's the founding leader of the Google Brain deep learning project. He's also the founding father of Google Street View and on top of it all he's an adjunct professor at Stanford University. So he is a very smart and well respected guy. And when he came out with a machine learning as well as a deep learning course on Coursera everybody freaked out because he is basically a world-renowned expert on the subject. And in today's video we're going to be going over the machine learning course. Now this particular one course one of three is going to be supervised machine learning regression and classification. Now this course has a 4.9 star rating which is really really good. A good rating on Coursera is like 4.6 stars. So 4.9 is pretty much unheard of and it has a 99% thumbs up right and that's at 5,900 ratings. And by the way if you want to check out the specialization I'll put that down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. There is a seven day free trial so you can check it out without paying any money whatsoever. And after that I believe for the machine learning specialization it is $49 per month. So like I said click the link it is an affiliate link so if you click it and you choose to buy it will help the channel out a little bit and I appreciate that. All right so let's go over just a bit of an overview of the course itself. So first of all you do get a shareable certificate after you complete the course and that's always really good. Certificates are becoming more and more respected and this course in particular is actually highly respected in the machine learning AI deep learning industry. On top of that there are flexible deadlines so some of the Coursera certificates are completely flexible. This one it's not completely flexible there are flexible deadlines right but you can reset the deadlines in accordance to your schedule. It is 100% online so that's great you don't have to go to any physical locations and this is a beginner level course somehow. I kind of doubt that a little bit. Their definition of beginner might be a little bit different than most people's definition so they say you need to know basic coding and high school level math like arithmetic and algebra and then all the other math concepts will be explained and they say it takes approximately 33 hours to complete. Now this course goes by the week so week one is introduction to machine learning week two is regression with multiple input variables and week three is classification. Now by the way Andrew first came out with the machine learning course in the early 2010 so this is actually an updated version it was updated just in 2022. So let's go ahead and go over some important variables like time to completion the cost the demand the salary the production value engagement the chances of landing you a job as well as what value does the course offer overall and then at the end I'm going to score all of these on a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being the best and give you a final score as well as my opinion on whether this is worth it or not. So first of all time to completion it does say on the page that all three courses will take around two months but with that being said you could potentially finish it faster really depends on how busy you are you know maybe you have a full-time job a family you're very busy and it also depends on how much you already know so maybe you're already an expert in machine learning in that case you can probably breeze through it but this person on Reddit said it depends on the amount of time you can take out of a day I guess it took me almost 40 hours and since my project at work has been hectic to say the least it will take me almost 1.5 months I'm in the last week now now keep in mind that was the old machine learning course so it's not necessarily exactly the same so in this particular case I would say it's likely going to take you somewhere between one to two months to finish the entire course and if you compare this do something like getting a college degree or going to a boot camp it's obviously much quicker so getting a college degree takes like 5.1 years on average and something like machine learning you're likely going to get a master's and in some case even a doctorate because like I said machine learning is very big brain and then a boot camp that varies greatly sometimes they take three months sometimes they take 12 months a lot of the time the coding boot camps are going to be longer so this is a faster version of education but with that being said this is a total apples to oranges comparison a certification is not the same as a boot camp and a boot camp is not the same as a degree but with that being said you can get through this relatively fast and I think one of the advantages is you can take this certification for almost nothing and just see if you like machine learning right if you're somebody who's 18 right now maybe you're going to school you're thinking about getting a computer science degree why don't you just go ahead take the certification and see if you like machine learning if that's something that you are interested in getting into so yeah overall the time here you have to give it a 10 out of 10 next we're going to talk about the cost so uh Coursera costs about $49 a month for this particular one this specialization you also have a seven day free trial so you can try it out for free for seven days and then after that you have to pay $49 per month so if it takes you three months that would be approximately $150 so the obvious comparison here boot camps $10,000 or more college degrees $80 to $100,000 for a bachelor's and even more for a master's so this person on reddit kind of summarized it they say better than paying $20 to $30,000 for an MS degree that might also not prepare you for real-world problems for example my data scientist brother supervised a new hire with an MS in CS from stanford and he knew nothing and when he was put on warning that he had to get better at his job in like a month he chose not to and then he was going to get a job at google instead yeah that kind of sounds like a likely situation in tech so yeah for the cost I mean this is an absolute no-brainer learning these types of skills that almost nobody has these incredibly valuable skills for $150 from the world-renowned expert on machine learning Andrew Ng that's just incredible I'm going to go ahead and give this one a 10 out of 10 don't worry I'm not going to give every single one a 10 out of 10 in fact this next one's going to be quite a bit lower so next let's talk about the demand for the types of careers you might go into with this certification so some careers you might go into would be machine learning engineer data scientist nlp scientist business intelligent developer or a human-centered machine learning designer so if you type in machine learning engineer on linkedin at the entry level you are going to see about 40 000 results so there is a ton of people looking for machine learning engineers if you type in data scientists at the entry level there's going to be 144 000 results business intelligent developer 9 000 results artificial intelligence engineer 11 000 results big data engineer 8800 results research scientists 5500 results and data engineer 61 000 results so there's actually even more careers than that that are related to machine learning but I think you get the picture there is a ton of demand for people who have these skill sets and BLS is a little bit more general but if you look up computer and information research scientists you're going to see 33 000 jobs and they're growing at 21 percent which is much faster than average now another really cool thing about Coursera certifications is you can actually put them on your resume as well as your linkedin and you can say that you're taking the Coursera cert even if you haven't finished it so this is actually a common way that recruiters hiring managers etc headhunt people find people for positions so there's a very good chance that people will actually start reaching out to you if you have this certification on your profile so that's kind of like a life hack of having these certifications so overall when it comes to the demand and also the amount of work you have to put in and the amount of specialization you have to have in order to get good at this and just basically how big brain you have to be the demand isn't as good as you'd want to see there are other software development software engineering roles that are much easier to learn they have just as much demand if not more so with that being said i will give this one an 8.5 out of 10 next let's go ahead and talk about salary now this one wow like machine learning engineers make a lot of money so BLS again very general computer and information research scientists 131 000 a year if you look up machine learning engineer on glass door you're going to see 130 000 a year data scientists make 124 000 business intelligence developers make 107 000 artificial intelligence engineers make 127 000 big data engineers make 116 000 research scientists make 126 000 and data engineers make 112 000 so yeah pretty much all the jobs that you would go into if you are an expert in machine learning if you really know your stuff are going to be very high paying jobs and of course you'd be working in the tech industry which you have options to work at even higher paying jobs it's not unheard of to get up to you know 250 000 300 000 500 000 even a million dollars a year so when it comes to salary absolute no-brainer this is a 10 out of 10 next let's talk about the production value and the engagement of the course so this is one of those courses that if you look across the internet people absolutely rave about it now i've done reviews on several of these Coursera certifications and some of them have kind of like lukewarm reviews some of them have like not so good reviews this is one that has excellent reviews like all across the internet people absolutely love this cert so obviously andrew ing did a great job he's the head instructor but there's also other really good instructors as well and here's a fellow youtuber who kind of left a lot of praise for andrew i think the best thing that didn't change is the instructor i'm so glad that andrew ing is still the one giving lectures in the new specialization so this person when they're suggesting how to learn about machine learning says start with andrew ing course they're referring to this course it will help you covering the basics of machine learning then make a project on it then you can jump on neural networks etc etc this person says hi i think the Coursera course on machine learning is good to start teacher is andrew ing a famous man in silicon valley here's the course link across the internet this course gets awards so for instance freecodecamp.org said that this was the best machine learning course in the world and the specialization was actually an improvement as well because a lot of people complained about them using matlab and they actually switched to python so here's some comments andrew ing's machine learning specialization is now in python all of the assignments are done in jupiter notebooks using python 3 this person says i'm glad andrew finally decided to switch from r to python now the truth is this course is kind of made for people who are relative newbies if you want to really become an expert on machine learning you of course are going to have to take other courses beyond this and do more projects and learn more on your own but with that being said the production value and engagement on this one has to be a 9.5 out of 10 next we're going to talk about the chances of landing you a job and unfortunately this is the one where this course is going to take a little bit of a hit because like i said before this is really big brain stuff right this is stuff where you know there's a lot of careers out there you can get into with a certification or an online course i talk about many of them on my channel this is not one of them you can get into in like you know three to six months this is something that is going to take you years to learn even if you're a genius but with that being said there are still some success stories so for instance this person says i landed a job after three months of studying hear my story i started with andrew eng deep learning specialization i struggled with python at first but somehow managed to finish the first four courses and yes i did all the assignments here i felt that i'm missing something all i knew now is supervised techniques but andrew kept talking about unsupervised learning so yes i took machine learning course by andrew eng at this time i wanted to fill my resume with projects so i searched step by step projects and followed it mainly it was made with ml.com i made two heavy projects text classification and hand gesture recognition and four mini projects so they didn't really go into what kind of background they had like maybe they had an extensive coding background but they were able to switch into a machine learning role in three months and they started with this course now most people say that in addition to the certification if you want to get a job without going to graduate school or something along those lines you need to build out a really impressive portfolio and that's something that's getting more and more common people not only want to know that you have the skills or you say that you have the skills needed for the job but they actually want to see it right they want you to show them a portfolio that very quickly and clearly demonstrates that you have those skills so for instance uh this person says do kaggle build a project start working on a portfolio where you can add and link projects to a resume start learning how to apply models to real world data sets to solve real world problems this person says write personal blog create projects and put on github write a good-looking read me even better put your model and production using flask companies are more interested in having something that looks alive rather than having a little bit of improved accuracy of the model so i have to say this will help you to get a job in machine learning but it's probably not going to get you a job especially if you're somebody who is starting off with very little knowledge now if you have an extensive background in software engineering then you take this certification and you have a really good portfolio then it might help you out then you might actually get a job right away but for most people this is not just going to get you a job right off the bat so chances of landing your job here i'm going to have to give this one a 6.5 out of 10 next let's talk about what value does it offer so when we talk about value i always like to talk about risk and reward so what are you risking here in terms of money you're risking about $150 in terms of time you're risking maybe three months now you compare that to a college degree boot camp etc college degree you're risking 5.1 years even more if you get a master's and you're probably going to risk like a hundred thousand dollars with the boot camp it's going to be like ten thousand dollars and you're risking three to twelve months of your life so it's very clear that you're not risking all that much time effort or money and so if for whatever reason you don't like it within the first seven days or even after the first seven days you can just go ahead and cancel if you cancel within the first seven days you don't spend any money you cancel after the first seven days it'll cost you about $50 so if you're in a position where let's say you are a software developer you're kind of in an entry-level role and you're wondering what should you specialize in this might be a great thing for you to check out see if you like machine learning maybe you start taking it and you absolutely hate it that's great you didn't waste a bunch of time going to grad school and you got to figure out what you didn't like which is going to help you figure out what you actually do like so the value here is very obvious it doesn't cost you that much time effort or money for $150 this is an incredible value I mean you are not going to find value like that anywhere else on the internet so when it comes to a value perspective I'm going to give this one a 10 out of 10 now the overall score is going to be 9.21 out of 10 I would say this is definitely not for beginners it's probably better for people who already have a pretty extensive background in software development but if you are somebody who wants to learn about machine learning and you want to get into the whole AI deep learning sort of thing Andrew Ng is probably the best person to teach people about that people absolutely rave about this course I remember I asked one of my discord moderators Chris very knowledgeable guy in the tech industry what courses he recommended and this is one of the courses he recommended he really does not recommend that many things so yeah this is super good value highly recommend doing it if you want to just check it out to see if machine learning is something that you're interested in and definitely check out my video right here where I talk about the top five google certificates