Is IBM Skills Build good? Should you invest your time in self education?

Lately I took some time to investigate IBM online knowledge platform - IBM SkillsBuild. In this post I will briefly cover my impressions, advantages and disadvantages of the platform in general and courses in particular. I took threee classes: Artificial Intellegence, Data, and Cybersecurity, all on Fundamentials level. The reasons I picked these classes are following: they are relevant to my career path, they are interesting for me and I also wanted a good-looking badge :)

Skills Build Platform

Overall I got surprisingly good impressions. Repetitivness of material throught the course, different industry examples and case studies, wonderful diagrams and course structure. However it is not perfect and I would highlight the following drawbacks:

  • basic material (that might be not a draw back due to the level of the course)
  • few practical assignments (incluing coding)
  • small number of videos, but the quality of the videos is actually high
  • limited pool of quiz questions and their nature/complexity
  • more structured and straight-forward specialisations (medium/advanced complexity for general public)
  • IBM is trying to sell their products (which is expected and also is not a draw back since the classes I reviewed are free)

Special thanks to the x2 speed for the existing videos. Overall the platform is good quality, on par with Coursera, Udacity and others.

Classes

Data Fundamentials

7 hours suggested length, took me around 2.5 hrs.

Things I learned:

  • CRISPDM: Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining
  • KDD: Knowledge Discovery in Database
  • SEMMA: Sample Explore Modify model Assess
  • 5 V’s of Big Data: volume, value, variety, velocity, and veracity
  • IBM Watson Studio

Things I knew (highlights):

  • Data types
  • Data analysis techniques
  • General data pipelines
  • Tools and languages (R, SQL, Python, Tableau and etc.)
  • Visualizations
  • Roles/responsibilities and job market

Artificial Intellegence Fundamentials

10 hours suggested length, took me around 4 hrs.

Things I learned:

  • AI Ethics
  • Model vulnarabilities
  • Narrow, Broad, General definitions
  • COT prompting

Things I knew (highlights):

  • General definitions (AI, ML, DL)
  • Data types
  • NLP
  • Real world examples, application, history
  • Roles/responsibilities and job market
  • CNN, RAG
  • LLM, Prompt engineering

Cybersecurity Fundamentials

6 hours suggested length, took me around 4 hrs.

Things I learned:

  • MITRE ATT&CK
  • IBM QRadar
  • CyberKillChain
  • Some useful online resources

Things I knew (highlights):

  • Types of intruders
  • Types of attacks
  • Social engineering
  • DMZ, network segregation
  • Encryption

Summary

I would recommend these classes and the platform to people who are new to the disciplines or undergrads or to someone who want to formalize/structure their knowledge. No doubts, you may find the material available online (or even ask chatGPT about it), but why would you want to reinvent the bycicle? Also IBM Badges might be a good CV filler (together with the suggested skills).

If you read till the end, I encourage you to share your thoughts or experiences with IBM SkillsBuild or other learnign platforms.

P.S. Written with a help of GPT-4.0
P.S.2. I have implemented Google Analytics engine to this blog (Hello to my ~bots~ readers from Italy and Germany) so in the next post we will review the basic features and the how-to guide.