Microsoft announced a new program last year to help you understand the skills that a Data Scientist needs in their daily life.  It consists of nine courses and a final project, you can get all the details about it on the Microsoft Academy site.  I started working on this at the end of 2016 when things were slow at work and at home.  I completed seven of the courses before things started to pick up at work and home.  I’ve been mid-way through the eighth course for almost four months now, having to go back to the beginning of the course a few times due to being pulled away. 

The program has been very informative so far, providing courses on statistics and probability, Machine Learning, Power BI, R (and Python) and general data science concepts.  I’m hoping things will slow down a bit so I can complete the program by the end of Summer.

If you are at all curious about what a Data Scientist does, I highly recommend this program.  The great thing about this program is that you can take all the courses for free, that’s right, I said free, gratis, no dough required, etc.  However, if you do opt for the free route, you don’t earn that beautiful certificate that you can share with others, you just get the satisfaction of completing the course and broadening your horizons.  Either way, it’s a good way to get started in the field of Data Science.