IBM Data Engineering

Building the pipes data science runs on

IBM's Data Engineering Professional Certificate is a beginner-level program focused on the infrastructure side of data work — moving, storing and governing data reliably, rather than analyzing it once it's already clean.

What's covered

• ETL (extract, transform, load) pipelines and data integration
• SQL, relational databases and NoSQL alternatives
• Data warehousing, data lakes and broader data architecture
• Apache Spark for big data processing at scale

It's aimed at people who want the engineering side of the data stack specifically — building systems other analysts and scientists rely on — rather than a data analysis or visualization course. With over 180,000 learners enrolled, it's a well-established path into a role that's in steady demand as organizations accumulate more data than they can easily manage.