Course overview

Data Education in Colleges has launched a free course for Women who would like the opportunity to develop skills in Digital and Data Innovation.  
Are you in a job where you are using data and want to reskill or upskill? Looking for something you can study flexibly around your work, that’s also free?
The Professional Development Award in Data Science is delivered to fit your life and is completely free to study.
Data Science is the fastest-growing Tech industry area, and all employers are looking for Data savvy professionals to join their teams. Data gives insights that give businesses a competitive edge or inspire innovation and adaptation to improve lives, processes, and systems.

Data is part of every industry:
Engineering, Health and Social Care/ Marketing/ Software development/ Cyber Security, Finance and retail, to name but a few.
Edinburgh College offers many Data science qualifications in many contexts to meet your needs. 

About this Data Science Award
The course has an 18-week structure and is guided by lecturer support via in-person delivery and online video lessons. This course is free to study, as it is fully funded by The Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) Skills Gateway. Upon successfully completing this course, you will gain a Professional Award in Data Science at SCQF level 7.

The focus of the award at SCQF level 7 is to improve the learner’s effectiveness in their current or future job role, which may be non-technical and not directly related to data science.
This course will:

• Improve the data skills of learners to prepare them to work more capably with data in their role as data workers.
• Develop learners’ statistical and communication skills as they relate to data science.
• Develop analytical skills to gain insights into datasets and make data-driven decisions in a business or organisational context.
• Develop meta skills and other transferable skills required for learning in life and work.

Data Education in Colleges worked directly with the SQA to develop this course and has a significant role in data education in Scotland.

This is an 18-week course and runs over one semester

What you will learnThis course has three units across the duration of the course:

• Working with Data
• Communicating with Data
• Data Science Project

In the course, you will develop your analysis and communication skills to prepare you to work in a data worker role.

Help you appreciate the range of tools and techniques available for data analysis, including industry standard software and visualisation tools – Microsoft Excel and PowerBI.
You will be introduced to creating data models, using large datasets, to gain insights into business data using a range of visualisations and dashboards.

How the course is assessed

This is a hybrid course where each group will have their own lecturer and the assessments will be released to students as each outcome of the course is delivered, assessments are in the form of coursework, project-based assignments and reports.

Number of days per week

Project-based tasks will be released every week, it is estimated this could require 4-6 hours per week of your time depending on your experience level.

Entry requirements

• Applicants don’t need to have a qualification in a computer science-related award before. Still, a small amount of knowledge is advantageous, in Microsoft Excel and Numeracy at SCQF level 5 or 6.
• The purpose of the course is to be accessible to a broad community of people no matter your qualifications or work/life experience, so if in doubt please apply as we have courses at all levels from beginner to advanced.
   

English Proficiency Requirements

IELTS 6.5

Progression and Articulation Routes

Upon fulfilling the prerequisites of the PDA Data Science (SCQF level 7) and successfully completing a bridging course focused on Python programming, you may gain entry into the PDA Data Science (SCQF level 8) program. The specific eligibility will depend on your existing skills and qualifications.
 

Career options

• For those starting their career, this is a gateway qualification to study at a higher level at college.
• For those with previous work experience, this qualification provides a great addition to your CV.
• Entry-level jobs in data science, data analytics or business analysis roles