R Certification

Background

We have seen an exponential increase in the demand of R among a large and variant set of audiences. People from various domains are keen to learn it and further improve their skills. This has created a supply and demand gap which is being filled by various teaching channels. While there is no dearth of the amount of R teaching material, both in-class and online, there is still arguably a shortage in skilled R users who possess quality skills in R. This shortage of qualified personnel and abundance of self-taught data scientists leads to confusion for employers as well as prospective employees who have the required skill-set but no way to differentiate themselves.

Proposal

There is no system today to certify qualified R Professionals. The R-Consortium, as the governing body for the R community, needs to step in as the neutral agency before another third-party comes in with a similar certification mechanism and tries to fill this gap. From a competitive perspective, SPSS and SAS already has a certification mechanism in place.

Moving Parts

We understand that there are multiple moving pieces and we have identified 3 main areas to bucket them – 1. Specialization 2. Training 3. Testing 4. Certification We have also taken a stab at the sub categories under those buckets and the multiple paths that we can have for those functional areas that would allow the R Community to solve for the above mentioned challenges.

The likely path of certification to be taken in the initial cut

Key decisions to be made

The WG will work on the following elements regarding R certification:

1. Financials –

• Cost
  • Vendor Cost
  • Consortium Cost
  • Student Cost
• Profits

2. Marketing and Promotions 3. Testing

• Pass/Fail outcome
• Percentage – 0 to 100%
• Certification Levels

4. How long the certificate remains valid 5. Partnerships

• Training
• Testing
• Certifications

6. Curriculum –

• Generic
• Pharmacy
• Financial
• Visualizations
• Others

7. Phased Approach

• Identify the next couple of phases
• Phase 1
• Phase 2

Members

• David Smith (Microsoft)
• Jeremy Reynolds (Microsoft)
• Jonathan Cornelissen (Datacamp)
• Martijn Theuwissen (DataCamp)
• Mark Sellors (Mango Solution)
• Aimee Gott (Mango Solutions)
• Hadley Wickham (ISC liason, RStudio)
• Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel (RStudio)
• Dinesh Nirmal (IBM)
• MeharPratap Singh (ProCogia)