Get Hadoop certified ... fast

Network World - IT professionals are scrambling to get trained and certified in what's expected to be the hottest new high-tech skill for 2012: Hadoop.

Apache Hadoop is open source data management software for analyzing large volumes of structured and unstructured data in a distributed manner. It is used by such popular Web sites as Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn and eBay.

Hadoop is gaining popularity as U.S. corporations in all vertical industries -- financial services, utilities, media, retail, energy and pharmaceuticals -- embrace the concept of "big data,'' which refers to the analysis of huge volumes of real-time data to identify trends and increase profitability.

BACKGROUND: Hadoop wins over enterprises, spawns talent crunch

Several training courses and certification programs are available for IT professionals interested in Hadoop development and administration. Big-picture courses about Hadoop and the broader area of "big data" are also available for IT executives such as CIOs and CTOs.

Companies offering Hadoop training include Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, MapR and Informatica.

Cloudera has been offering Hadoop training for three years as a complement to its enterprise-class Hadoop software. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company offers six Hadoop-related courses aimed at four different audiences: programmers, data base analysts, system administrators and IT managers.

"Companies are struggling to hire Hadoop talent," says Sarah Sproehnle, director of educational services at Cloudera. "We've been doing Hadoop for awhile. We've put all of the best practices into our training so we can get people really quickly up to speed."

Cloudera's Hadoop courses are four days long, feature instructor-led training and lab work, and cost around $2,000. Cloudera provides a certification to IT professionals who complete the course.

"Our certification is quite popular," Sproehnle says. "Some of the industries that are adopting Hadoop ... want assurances that the people who are going to manage their petabytes of data are reliable. But if they've taken our courses and passed our certification, that's proof. We've seen people bragging about our certifications in online posts, and we've seen job postings looking for our certifications."

Demand for Cloudera's Hadoop classes has risen dramatically in the last few months, with the number of people being trained in the first quarter of 2012 expected to be four times greater than during the first quarter of 2011.

In fact, Cloudera's training courses were sold out at the third annual Hadoop World Conference in New York City last November. Nearly 2,000 people attended the conference.

"Over 10,000 people have come through our Hadoop curriculum in three years. But by the end of 2012, we will train another 10,000 people," Sproehnle says. "People are coming out of the woodwork to take our courses."