Does anyone know of a company that accepts any of their certificates as valuable? I am curious to see if they are actually making a difference in the employment markets.
I have also done it for various unwanted corporate training. :)
So that hypothesis makes sense.
That made me pretty convinced a cert wouldnt be worth much, which is unfortunate because I really put in the work to learn the material. OTOH, I largely consider certificates to be a bogus signal, and even often negative, so that not really surprising.
So that could in part explain the short completion times, although I'm not sure how many people use this 'trick'. Coincidentally though, I've learnt about this trick in relation to the exact course you mentioned (deep learning.)
"If you complete a course during the free trial period, Coursera reserves the right to require you to pay for a one-month subscription in order to receive a Course and/or Specialization Certificate."
Most people will tell you that a Coursera certificate is useless for getting a job, yet the folks at interviewing.io found it was very strongly correlated with interview performance [1]:
"For people who attended top schools, completing Udacity or Coursera courses didn’t appear to matter. However, for people who did not, the effect was huge, so huge, in fact, that it dominated the board. Moreover, interviewees who attended top schools performed significantly worse than interviewees who had not attended top schools but HAD taken a Udacity or Coursera course"
Why are recruiters ignoring such a strong signal?
My guess is that most people recognize how easy it is to cheat a Coursera course, so it is generally not considered valuable by recruiters. Therefore most job-seekers do not place any value on a certificate, so they will not be bothered to try to cheat to get one. So the only people remaining who complete the course are those that are doing it because they enjoy the subject matter, which is clearly associated with passing the interview. There is therefore a perverse feedback loop where any recognition of the high value of the course leads to cheating which causes it to become worthless (this reminds me a little of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle).
[1] http://blog.interviewing.io/lessons-from-3000-technical-inte...
The reason I take the courses is because they are useful. If you put an effort into doing the labs, then you'll get something out of it. My approach is to try to write the solution to the problem based on the description, then compare with the solution provided to the lab. This ensure that I really learn the material from the labs. Every lab I've taken has provided enough time to get through it using this approach.
However, the labs offer the solution of the problems right in the description, and you get an infinite number of retries for the lab questions. So you can easily complete the entire course without doing any of the work.
So, the course material is designed to actually teach people who put in the effort, but the certificates themselves are a worthless signal of the amount of effort someone put into the class.
But, I do think the coursework is educational.
I graduated from SEA. Nobody ever asked about it or mentioned it. I'm sure they wouldn't even know how to pronounce my college's name correctly.
Did you learn it from books? Coursera? MIT? Less interesting than you did it here and this other place with this kind of success given the projects respective constraints. And that can often be a personal project.
Anyone getting too excited about the signalling value of the name on your school is looking at the wrong thing and might be a bit garbage to work for as well.
Or is it something only worth doing for personal fulfillment?
Coursera has a very heavy pitch about employability.
That doesn’t mean you don’t gain valuable knowledge but it’s unlikely to be in demand from an employer.
The majority of value comes in learning the material & being able to discuss related topics during interviews or while networking.
This isn't that I would avoid doing Coursera but it might mean I'd opt for other trainings offered. For example you can get AWS certified multiple ways, but the best way is prob through Amazon's AWS training.