 Is the Google IT automation with Python certificate from Coursera actually worth it? That's going to be the topic of today's video. So we're going to start with an overview of the course. Then we're going to move on to the time that it takes to complete the certificate. Then we're going to talk about the cost. We'll talk about the demand for the types of careers that you would go into. We'll talk about the salary for those careers as well. Then the production value and the engagement of the course. Then the course's chances of landing you a job. And finally, we'll talk about the overall value of the certificate. And we're also going to rank all of those criteria from 1 to 10 with 10 being the best. And at the end of the video, I'll give you a final score. And then I'll also talk about the pros and cons of the certificate and whether it's worth it or not for you. So if you appreciate me going through these certifications talking about whether I think they're worth it or not and going through hours and hours of research, go ahead, gently tap that like button and let's get into it. Alright, so first of all, this is a course that has 29,000 ratings and a 4.8 star average rating. And it says that you are going to learn in-demand skills like Python, get an IT automation to advance your career. At the end of the course, you will earn a certificate that you can put on your resume as well as your LinkedIn profile. It's a 100% online course. It's totally flexible. You can take it whenever you want, whether that's your lunch break, morning or evening. It's also beginner level and does not require any previous experience. Let's just start at zero, level zero. Now there are six total courses that you'll have to take in order to get the professional certificate. Course number one is going to be a crash course on Python. Course two is using Python to interact with the operating system. Course three is introduction to Git and GitHub. Course four is troubleshooting and debugging techniques. Course five is configuration management and the cloud. And course six is automating real world tasks with Python. And all of the courses have either a 4.8, 4.7, or 4.6 star rating, which is excellent. All right. So first of all, let's talk about the time to completion. So they say this is going to take about six months to complete. They say that on almost all of the Google certifications. And that's with 10 hours of study per week. But remember, you can take it at any time. As this person says, he was able to, quote, learn whenever it fits my schedule and mood. However, almost all of the self reporting actually indicates that you can finish the certificates much faster. So for instance, this person says, I did it the whole way through. If you're a system admin, it is totally worth it. But really, it's great overall. It took a solid three months to finish. I recommend having an introductory knowledge of Python before starting as they really dig in quick. So from my research, it did seem like you could relatively easily finish the certificate in about three months. And if you compare that to a coding bootcamp, which is often 10 to 12 months, or you can compare that to a college degree, which takes 5.1 years on average, that's really quick. But with that being said, it is one of the certifications that does take a little bit longer. Obviously, you're learning kind of a high level skill like coding. So it is going to take a bit longer, especially if you have zero experience. So for the time to completion, I'm going to give this one a nine out of 10. All right. So next, we're going to talk about cost. And obviously, college degrees ridiculously expensive these days, especially in the US, they cost anywhere from $80 to $100,000 on average bootcamps oftentimes cost $10,000 or more. And these are the obvious comparisons to this certification because there are other ways to get educated in order to land a high paying job. Well, it actually depends on where you live, the price is going to change depending on what country you live in. And if you click on the link below, which I'll put in the pen comment as well as the description, depending on where your geo located, it will tell you how much they cost. But with that being said, there is typically a seven day free trial where you can try it out completely free. So definitely check that out. Now, at the time of recording this video, Coursera costs about $39 a month. So $39 a month, three months time to finish it. That's about $120 or so, not bad. And it's actually really good when you compare it to the alternatives, which are a bootcamp or a college degree. Now, is the certification an equivalent for a bootcamp or a college degree? We'll get to that later on in the video. Now, I'm not a big fan of the seven day Coursera refund policy. But with that being said, if they didn't do that, there'd probably be a ton of people that just abuse the refund policy. So I'm guessing that's why they do that. So when you compare it to basically any other way of getting educated to get into a high paying job, there's really no comparison. This is the cheapest possible way you can do it. I'm going to give this one a 10 out of 10 when it comes to cost. Next on the list, we're going to be talking about the demand. Now on the certificate homepage, it says that according to analytics software company Burning Glass, more than 530,000 US job postings currently require Python proficiency, including 75,000 entry level jobs. Now, some of the common jobs that they say this certificate will prepare you for are going to be advanced IT support specialist and junior systems administrator. Now, if you look up IT administrator on LinkedIn at the entry level, you're going to see about 14,000 results. And there's probably a ton of other IT related careers that you could potentially go into. So I believe the numbers that they're showing on the homepage. So you could of course go into an IT related position. And also because of the fact that you learned Python, you might go into software development as well. Although that is much more difficult to break into. But software developers according to BLS make about $109,000 a year, they're growing at 25%, which is much faster than average. And there's already 1.6 million jobs available. So these are very valuable skills, whether you go into IT, or you try to get into software development later on, there's tons of jobs out there that are going to have a ton of demand, and they're going to be really high paying, and they're also going to treat you really well too. So this one, I'm going to give a nine out of 10 when it comes to the demand score. Next, we're going to go ahead and talk about salary. So according to BLS software developers make about $109,000 a year, as I mentioned before. And according to Glassdoor, you know, one career path you might go into is an IT software engineer, they make about $110,000 a year. Then of course, an IT admin, which is a lower level role makes about $72,000 a year. And then an entry level role like IT help desks makes about $49,000 according to Glassdoor. But one thing that's really great about IT is it's actually almost an industry standard to be able to break in without having to get a degree. So it's very common in the IT industry for people to get jobs without getting a college degree. And so IT is one of those industries where it's very likely that you can land yourself a job without a degree. So when you see that entry level, you know $49,000 a year number, it probably doesn't sound all that good. But I think you should think about it like you're getting paid to learn, right? Some people go to college and they pay $50,000 a year to learn. Other people will get paid $50,000 a year to learn. And by the time you get to that three to four year mark, you might even be past the six figure mark. So overall, I'm going to give the salary a nine out of 10. Next one on the list is going to be the production value and engagement. And I'm going to be honest, there are quite a few negative comments about this certification as a whole. And I think one of the main reasons is it gets compared to the other Google IT certification, which might be the best one. So this person says I've gone through it. It's a bit of meh. The project environment is sometimes buggy and won't register your progress. And I was in the initial batch where the final course in the series was not released until many weeks later. It doesn't teach Python. It's mainly about automating some stuff. This person says it was definitely all over the place. They try to teach too much in one course. It was basically like getting an international relations degree, classes in law, politics, business, diplomacy, culture, etc. You're left with a broad knowledge of things, but no one expertise. This person says I signed up for both and dropped out of Python four weeks in. It's not for beginners at all. It's definitely for someone who is very proficient in other script languages. IT support is detailed and it's easy to cram weeks worth of modules in one week. Sometimes I'm able to do a full week and one night do have a notebook though. That's my biggest help. So this kind of goes back to what I was saying before a software development is a pretty high level skill to learn in a short period of time. Typically, it's going to take people six months to a year to get really proficient at software development. However, IT on the other hand, honestly, especially if you know exactly what job you're going for, you can learn that stuff really quickly. This person says I tried this program and I think it's a pretty terrible explanation on programming. If you get stuck, there really isn't anyone to help you. I have talked to many others and none of them could get past the first section due to not understanding the language and there really isn't much help. This person says I finished Google's Python cert last month. You will need some Python or at least programming skills to work through the course. I didn't find it basic at all, even though I have been working with Python occasionally over the last year, but it's a very good course regardless, lots of stuff to learn. This person says I am taking it and oh my gosh, it's so hard. It's almost like they are trying to turn people away from programming with the way they sneak incredibly challenging problems into the lessons and quizzes that aren't even a fair reflection of what you learn in the modules in quite a few instances. And then at the bottom, they say I don't know how they can consider this a beginner level course I'm about to throw in the towel. This person says this is a perfect description of what those guys are doing. Basically discouraging people from programming. I regret getting started. They're not effective in teaching and applying Python for a whole bunch of unnecessary but difficult exercises. This person says I have taken both. If you are a beginner, start with Python for everybody. It is designed for beginners with no coding experience. In my opinion, the Google course can be a little fast-paced and daunting to deal with for beginners, but it is a good course nonetheless. You can take the specialization after completing Python for everyone. So yeah, I think you see my point here. When it comes to production value and engagement, they didn't necessarily do the best job teaching in this course based on the feedback. But with that being said, if you already have some Python experience, it seems pretty good. But you might want to learn that separately. Because like I said before, software development is no joke. It's not an easy skill to learn. So I'd maybe recommend checking out free code camp or something along those lines to learn the Python side of things before you get started with this certificate. Or if you're already starting the certificate, go ahead and learn on free code camp if you ever get stuck. Overall, I'm going to have to give this one a six out of 10 when it comes to production value. Next one on the list is going to be its chances of landing you a job. So like I said before, the career paths that this certificate leads to do happen to be high paying and in demand type career paths where they're going to teach you very valuable skills. And companies are becoming more and more comfortable with hiring people that just have certifications rather than college degrees. The reason for this is very obvious if you've been following my channel, the value of a college degree has been going down for decades, and the cost has been going up. And inevitably at some point it will reach a tipping point. And I would argue for many degrees it already has that combined with the fact that when it comes to skills that are rapidly changing colleges are typically five to 10 years behind. And so it's actually much better to learn these skills in many cases from something like an online course or a certification. Now, after you finish the course, you will get access to a private job board, which will allow you to connect with over 130 companies that agreed to hire people with this certification. So that's definitely a great perk to have. And on top of that, the certificate that you get can be displayed on your LinkedIn, which is a great way for companies to find you. I can't tell you how many comments I've actually gotten on the channel from people who have gotten found from Coursera certifications through LinkedIn. This is actually like a massive cheat code right now, because people oftentimes aren't even having to apply for jobs with the right certificate. Now, I do think that you will have to supplement this with a great portfolio. You want to make sure that you actually know Python as well. You probably want to do some stuff outside of the course, like I mentioned before. But with that being said, this certificate might get you like 50 to 80% of the way there to getting you a job. However, it likely will not get you 100% of the way there. So overall, I'm going to give this one an eight out of 10 when it comes to your chances of landing a job. Next, we're going to talk about what value it offers. So the overall value of the course itself. So whenever you're talking about value, I also like to talk about risk and reward. What are you really risking when you take this certification? Well, it's $39 a month, right? So if you do the three months, you're risking about $120 and you are risking about three months of your time, but it's relatively flexible. So you're probably not going to be spending all of your day on the certification. So that's really not a lot to risk. So if you get like a month into this certificate, you realize the careers not for you, Python's not for you, something along those lines, you can very easily just switch to a different certificate. So you're not risking all that much time, effort or money. And even if it turns out you don't like it, you'll probably learn a lot about yourself and you'll figure out what you actually do like. So instead of going to a college and then three years in figuring out you absolutely do not want to have anything to do with that degree, or you don't want to go into the career path that that degree leads to, or going to a boot camp and realizing after you've already taken it that you don't want to go into that career path, you've already spent $10,000. These certificates are a nice breath of fresh air because you really don't have to risk all that much to figure out what you actually like. And I think that's the true value of the certificate. They are an extremely affordable way to learn in demand skills and also figure out what you like and what you want to do with your life. So if you don't like this one, you can move on to the UX design one. If you don't like that one, you can move on to the data analytics one, or you can move on to the other IT Google certification. So even though I don't think the certification on its own will get most people a job, when it comes to the value that this offers at $39 a month and just wasting maybe a few months of your time at most, this is incredibly valuable. I'm going to have to give this one a 10 out of 10. So the overall score here is 8.71 out of 10. This is still pretty good. It's on the lower side for the Google certifications though. Now the Google certifications in general are really good. Even though this is on the lower side for the Google certs, it's still really good overall. I do think you should do your research on this. Make sure you're prepared for the Python portion. Again, all that information will be down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. You can just click on that. It'll take you to the page and they'll tell you everything you need to know. But this is still going to get a thumbs up from me for the right type of person. This is definitely worth it. Just make sure you do your research and look into it. And while you're doing that, make sure to check this video out right here where I go over the top five Google certificates.