New Higher Diploma in Data Analytics at NCI

Today the Minister for Education Ruarí Quinn announced "760 ICT graduate skills conversion places" for graduates who wish to upskill in technology. These are level 8 Higher Diploma courses and range in subject areas from software development to cloud computing, details are available at www.ictskills.ie. The courses are free and will be run by higher educations institutes across the country. This is good news for both the HEIs and graduate students who are seeking employment. This is also good news for the National College of Ireland as we have been approved to deliver a Higher Diploma in Data Analytics for 50 students as part of this programme. It is a new programme that I have been involved with in developing over the past year.

The Higher Diploma in Data Analytics at NCI will include subjects such Statistics, Business Analysis, Programming for Big Data, and Data and Web Mining. "Big Data" is a term that has been around quite a while now and it is defined by Wipro as "data that is too large, complex and dynamic for any conventional data tools to capture, store, manage and analyse". The infographic below from Wipro is a nice summary of "big data" in healthcare. The figures on the map below are in petabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000 or a million gigabytes). Google alone processes about 24 petabytes per day according to Wikipedia - so there is a lot of data around!

I'm looking forward to meeting and maybe even teaching to the new students who will come onto this programme. It is a new area for NCI, and a new area for me.

Image source: Wipro.com.
Click image to enlarge for better view.