9 Best Data Engineering Courses You Should Take in 2023

Recently, data engineering has become an increasingly coveted space. With an average salary of over 112K USD, the demand for skilled data engineers is growing with every passing day. Data engineers combine their data and software engineering expertise to facilitate the data infrastructure of an organization. They build, orchestrate, and maintain data pipelines. 

Are you an aspiring data engineer, or someone with experience in the data space—looking to pivot into data engineering? 

If yes, you know that most job listings for data engineers can often be daunting—with a whole bunch of good-to-know tools and required experience.

And that’s why we’ve put together this guide. In this list, you'll find some of the best data engineering courses and career paths that can help you jumpstart your data engineering journey!

Let’s dive in!

List of Data Engineering Courses to Take in 2023

1. IBM Data Engineering Professional Certificate
2. Coursera Google Cloud Data Engineer Professional Certificate
3. DataCamp’s Data Engineer with Python Career Track
4. Dataquest’s Data Engineer Career Track
5. Udacity Data Engineer Nanodegree
6. Data Engineering Zoomcamp
7. Data Warehouse Fundamentals for Beginners
8. AWS Solutions Architect Associate Cert Prep
9. Taming Big Data with Apache Spark and Python

1. IBM Data Engineering Professional Certificate

The IBM Data Engineering Professional Certificate on Coursera is one of the most popular data engineering specializations.

In this series of courses, you’ll learn the following:

• Relational Database Management Systems, such as MySQL and PostgreSQL
• Advanced SQL queries
• NoSQL and big data using Hadoop, Apache Spark, MongoDB, Cassandra, and more
• Implementation of ETL and data pipelines using Bash, Airflow and Kafka
• Creating BI reports and interactive dashboards

Pricing: Free to audit; Upgrade or Apply for financial aid to get a verified certificate. For more details on upgrading to a Coursera Plus subscription, check this link.

2. Coursera Google Cloud Data Engineer Professional Certificate

Preparing for Google Cloud Data Engineer Professional Certificate on Coursera is designed to provide you with the skills you’ll need to tackle the industry-recognized Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer certification.

You’ll learn big data and data engineering fundamentals with focus on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Here’s a list of courses you'll go through in the specialization:

• Big Data and Machine Learning fundamentals
• Modernizing data lakes and data warehouses on Google Cloud
• Building Batch Data Pipelines on GCP
• Building Resilient Streaming Analytics Systems on Google Cloud
• Smart Analytics, Machine Learning, and AI on GCP

Watch this video to know Seattle Data Guy’s review of the Google Data Engineer Professional Certificate.

Pricing: Free to audit; Upgrade or Apply for financial aid to get a verified certificate. For more details on upgrading to a Coursera Plus subscription, check this link.

3. DataCamp’s Data Engineer with Python Career Track

DataCamp’s Data Engineer Career Track is one of the most popular learning paths. With over 70 hours of coursework, you’ll learn several useful data engineering tools.  As a prerequisite, you should be comfortable with Python and SQL fundamentals.

What you’ll learn:

• Intermediate Python and SQL
• Relational Databases and  Database Design
• Several big data tools like PySpark, Airflow, AWS Boto, MongoDB, and more 
  

Learn more about the courses.

Pricing: DataCamp has both monthly, and annual subscription plans starting at $5/month. You’d need a DataCamp subscription to access this track. You can find more details on the available plans here.

4. Dataquest’s Data Engineer Career Track

Dataquest’s Data Engineering Career Path is designed to help you level up your Python and SQL skills as you work your way through the curriculum. You’ll spend a lot of time learning and practicing Python and SQL.

The key components in this career path include:

• Gain proficiency in Python programming
• Level up SQL skills and PostgreSQL
• Build data pipelines

You can learn more about this career track here.

Pricing: Dataquest also has a subscription model, costing around $20/month.

5. Udacity Data Engineer Nanodegree

Udacity’s Data Engineer Nanodegree is designed to equip you with working knowledge of some of the most common tools you'll be using as a data engineer from time to time. 

In this nanodegree, you'll do data modeling, build cloud data warehouses and data pipelines. You'll also apply all that you've learned in a capstone project.

You can check out the course, learn about the discounts available, and download the detailed curriculum here.

Pricing: Udacity has a pay-as-you-go model, costing $399/month. The faster you finish, the more you can save. 😀 In addition, they also offer personalized discounts. For more details, visit this link.

6. Data Engineering Zoomcamp

Data Engineering Zoomcamp by DataTalks.Club is a free, online data engineering course. The first cohort of the Data Engineering Zoomcamp started on 17th January, 2022.

This course is taught by Alexey Grigorev and a team of instructors including professional data engineers with many years of experience. Over a 9-week period, this course covers a lot of ground—including analytics engineering, batch and stream processing.

If you enjoy learning with a community of highly motivated learners, consider checking out DataTalks.Club and join their Slack workspace to be notified of future events and courses. 

All the course materials, assignments, and solutions can be accessed from this GitHub repo that has over 3K stars (as of writing this post).

Pricing: Free ✅

So far, we’ve listed down some of the data engineering courses that cover a wide breadth of knowledge. Now, we’ll list a few useful resources that’ll help you understand more specific tools and aspects of data engineering.

7. Data Warehouse Fundamentals for Beginners

Data Warehouse Fundamentals for Beginners on Udemy is a great course to understand data modeling and best architectural practices. 

The key concepts you’ll learn in this course include the following:

• The techniques needed to build data warehouses for your organization—with the optimal architecture
• The concepts of dimensional data modeling.

Pricing: $10 to $15 (during Udemy sale)

8. AWS Solutions Architect Associate Cert Prep

As a data engineer, you should be familiar with at least one cloud service provider, and here’s an excellent course on Udemy to learn about Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Trusted by close to 500K learners from across the globe, this is one of the highest rated courses on Udemy. It’s continuously improved and updated, and this course will also help you prepare for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate Certification.

Pricing: $10 to $15 (during Udemy sale)

9. Taming Big Data with Apache Spark and Python

If you’re looking to learn big data analysis with Spark, Taming Big Data with Apache Spark and Python on Udemy would be a great choice.

In this hands-on course, you'll learn how to:

• formulate data analysis problems as Spark problems
• analyze large data sets, and run algorithms on data that’s distributed across many CPUs 
• use Spark SQL to analyze structured data

Pricing: $10 to $15 (during Udemy sale)

Final Thoughts on These Data Engineering Courses

It’s true that we learn best by doing. So once you've picked up on the foundational skills from one or more of these courses, you may try building projects to apply your learning.

If you know other helpful courses that you think should be added to this list, feel free to raise a PR to this GitHub repo that houses all my HackerNoon stories. Or feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments below!

Thanks for reading this far! I hope you found this listicle of data engineering courses helpful. If you know someone who’d benefit from these resources, please do share with them. Happy data engineering! Until next time. 😄