Africa’s largest data science academy, Explore Data Science Academy, has added data engineering to its online training offerings.

Starting Monday, 18 January, the 12-month course will provide applicants with the specific skill set required to become data engineers — a key role in the successful digital transformation of a business.

Shaun Dippnall, CEO of Explore, explains: “The use of vast quantities of data by data scientists now requires those with a specialised skill set to organise data and ensure its quality, security and availability to the organisation. These are data engineers.”

According to Dippnall, apart from the skill set, there is a shortage of training courses online that offer both the content and practical application of data engineering skills required in the workplace. This is particularly true of the South African market.

Course attendees will learn:

SQL basics;
Python programming;
Data modelling; and
Cloud computing

To these will be added specific data architecture skills such as:

Big data concepts;
Data warehousing and lakes; and
Data automation.

“In the digital world of today, data engineering has become a specific job category as the amount of data produced by businesses engaged in digital transformation increases exponentially,” Dippnall says.

Two distinct roles

“Today’s businesses produce new types of data in vast quantities. While data scientists have traditionally been expected to build the necessary infrastructure and data pipelines to do their work, the volume and speed of data production has resulted in the roles of data scientist and data engineer becoming separate and distinct,” he says.

“It is now recognised that companies need both data scientists and data engineers in an advanced analytics team. Naturally, there is frequent collaboration between the two roles but their skills sets and tools remain different,” he adds.

Essentially, data engineers design and build pipelines that transform and transport data into a format so that, by the time it reaches the data scientists, it is usable. These pipelines take data from numerous sources and collect them into a single warehouse that presents the data uniformly as a single source.

Data centre stimulus

The importance of data engineering is underscored by the fact that two of the world’s largest cloud computing hyperscalers — Microsoft and Amazon Web Services — have recently established data centres in South Africa.

Microsoft launched two Azure cloud data centres in South Africa in 2019 to tap into the growing demand for hyperscale cloud infrastructure and services in the region; Amazon Web Services launched AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region — the company’s first in Africa — in April last year.

According to AWS, the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will stimulate innovation across the country. “South African organisations, from start-ups to enterprises and the public sector, now have infrastructure in their country to leverage advanced technologies such as analytics, artificial intelligence, database and Internet of things.”

The addition of the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will enable organisations to provide lower latency to end users across sub-Saharan Africa.

Explosive growth expected

“These critical developments by two of the world’s largest corporations underline just how important data warehousing is in the modern digital environment. Customers can now store their data in South Africa with the assurance that they can retain complete ownership of it,” says Dippnall.

The Explore Data Engineering course requires applicants to have a basic analytical background and will involve 10 hours of study a week.

Relevant jobs

“We at Explore have always been aware of the need to create jobs for talented and hard-working young South Africans,” Dippnall says.

According to research from International Data Corp, spending on public cloud services in South Africa will nearly triple over five years from 2017 to 2022.

“Crucially for us, this study estimates that the exponential adoption of cloud services will generate 112 000 net new jobs in South Africa by the end of 2022. For us at Explore, that is reason enough to introduce this new course,” he says.

Those interested in knowing more about Explpore’s data engineering course can go to explore-datascience.net/course/info/3/3/1.

EXPLORE also has financing options available to successful applicants. A loan option enables eligible students to fund their studies at an affordable rate. Candidates will have 36 months to pay.

About Explore Data Science Academy (EDSA)
The Explore Data Science Academy is the largest data science academy in Africa. It is led by top South African academics and practitioners with decades of experience in teaching and real-world problem solving. The academy is supported by a number of large South African companies and Amazon Web Services is its exclusive machine learning platform provider. Explore’s consulting business is currently solving complex business problems in a number of artificial intelligence and data science projects with leading UK and European businesses, such as Thames Water, Nordic Guarantee and CRP.