Meet Stijn, a project assistant from Brussels, Belgium. He recently earned his IBM Applied AI Professional Certificate and it opened new career opportunities and helped him build the skills and confidence to ace his job interviews. He shares his story below and offers his insights about the program as well as some valuable advice on career advancement.
My name is Stijn. I work in project assistance for market research at a French multinational company in Brussels. In school, I studied Economics and Tax Law, but I had a friend who studied Artificial Intelligence (AI) and got a number of job offers with excellent companies, which made me get interested in this field. I was looking for AI courses that didn’t require a deep background in IT, and that’s when I found the IBM Applied AI Professional Certificate on Coursera.
It made a big difference that the IBM Applied AI Professional Certificate didn’t require any prior coding experience. I was able to work on very specific projects and see real results by the end of my course. I learned how to train AI to recognize the difference between a table and a chair and had a lot of fun uploading an online sellers’ catalogue to test my project! I also enjoyed making my own chatbot.
I liked that I could take the class on my own time—mainly on the weekends, in my case. If I got stuck, I could look on the forum to see if someone else was having the same problem, and I always found a way to move forward with my projects. The coding wasn’t too difficult—there was a lot of drag-and-drop or changing small amounts of code here and there.
“It was very rewarding to get results so easily and early in the learning process.”
I would recommend this course to anyone who has even the slightest bit of interest in AI, but especially to professionals wanting to learn more about how AI applies to their jobs. You’ll really see results by the end of the course instead of just getting stuck on difficult coding, and the course mentoring support throughout makes the learning very easy. It’s not abstract; it’s really hands-on and has a lot of practical applications that anyone can use.
The IBM Applied AI Professional Certificate helped me get my current job. I had the certificate listed on my LinkedIn profile, which helped me get on my current employer’s shortlist, and when I was interviewing, I was able to speak to how AI would help automate their market research survey system. It helped me stand out in the interview process and get the job.
My company already uses IBM Cloud Services, and I’m hoping in the future to help them integrate AI into our current market survey systems. I think it will help us save lots of time by introducing automation and reducing the amount of manual work.
If you’re on the fence about taking the program, you should go for it. It’s not as expensive as certificates like this used to be; it’s within reach for most people. The program itself is very doable, even for people who aren’t familiar with programming. Overall, it was a very practical and enjoyable experience.
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Source:
https://blog.coursera.org/how-stijn-landed-his-new-job-after-completing-the-ibm-applied-ai-professional-certificate/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-stijn-landed-his-new-job-after-completing-the-ibm-applied-ai-professional-certificate