Certificate in Data Engineering Fundamentals

It builds the pipeline behind a coffee retailer's reports, one working layer at a time. You start with a small pipeline from start to finish and a plain-English tour of warehouses, lakes, ETL and ELT. Then you extract from databases, files and APIs, load incrementally, model data for analysis, transform and test it in dbt, and schedule it in Airflow. Later modules move it to a cloud warehouse, add pull requests and CI, and cover reliability, security and UK GDPR, before a capstone pipeline on live UK open data.

Yes. You should be comfortable with SELECT, joins and GROUP BY, the level our Certificate in SQL reaches. The CTEs, window functions and MERGE the course relies on are taught along the way, and Advanced SQL helps but isn't required.

Yes, in Python. You'll write extracts, tests and pipeline code throughout, so you need the basics first: functions, dictionaries and try/except. Python Programming gets you there if you're not there yet.

Only for BigQuery, where you add a payment card and the course has you cap spending before a single query runs. Python, DuckDB, dbt Core, Airflow and the rest are free and open source, and Docker Desktop is free for personal use and learning, though check your employer's rules before installing it on a work machine.

Analysts answer questions with data, and engineers build the systems that deliver it. If you like questions about people and decisions, lean analyst. If you like building things that run reliably without you, lean engineer, and this course is the place to find out.

You don't need data from work. The lessons follow a fictional coffee retailer, and the capstone runs on live UK open data, such as carbon intensity forecasts, river levels or street crime. Personal data is part of the job, so the course teaches you to minimise and protect it without practising on anyone real.

Your own Windows, Mac or Linux computer with admin rights, ideally with 16 GB of memory. The course runs Docker, which a locked-down work laptop may block and a Chromebook or tablet can't run.

Yes. Pass the final assessment and you get an OBA certificate of completion that an employer can verify online. It isn't a cloud provider's data engineering certification. A public repository with a pipeline that runs every day is the other half of the proof.

Download the free info pack first. It walks you through every module, what you'll build and what you need before you start, so you can enrol knowing exactly what you're getting. If you'd like to talk it through, get in touch and we'll help you choose.