Data Science for Investment Professionals Certificate

On June 15th, I completed the CFA® Institute’s Data Science for Investment Professionals Certificate. I know this because I was encouraged to post about it on LinkedIn. The reason it has taken me over two months to finally write about my experience on my own blog is technical difficulties.

There isn’t a lot of information on this certificate online. It seems to have been deemphasized on their website after being touted in this press release. This program was heavily marketed to me via email. I must have fit their target profile, either that or not very many people were signing up so anyone who indicated they had a professional development allowance in the annual CFA Members survey was inundated with emails.

Regardless we do have an allowance for professional development at my firm and I had not used mine for the previous year or perhaps even the year before that. The CFA program was a long hard slog for me, but since completing it the CFA Institute has introduced some professional learning requirements or at least suggestions which I had probably ignored. It turns out to earn your 20 PL credits you don’t need to pay the CFA Institute more money and take another course from them. I really should have done more research prior to registering, but I was being pressured at work to do something with my budget allotment for professional development as part of our annual employee review process.

What is Data Science?

It was sexy for a while, but now AI is eating the world. This course is however approximately 33% AI, but it is also 33% math. Which despite being covered in my masters degree, undergrad degree, and of course the CFA program itself, I once again slogged through. You’d think I’d mastered mean, mode, and median by now. The other third of this data science certificate covers things like ethics, data governance, even some story telling with data and graphics.

Although I cannot say I’m a regular reader, the blogosphere having also been eaten by AI, however I am aware of the towards data science website. They have also stuck AI in their tagline. The press release from the CFA Institute, if you didn’t bother to read it yet, had the following to say about what participants would learn in this course:

• Describe and evaluate machine learning techniques
• Select and develop data visualizations using Python and R
• Apply machine learning to address investment problems
• Explain machine learning techniques to a non-expert audience
• Use natural language processing to make investment decisions
• Evaluate and mitigate machine learning biases

So data science includes artificial intelligence because it includes machine learning. Large language models were also covered. Data science also includes statistics whether the aforementioned measurements of central tendency or the also heavily covered linear regressions. This course and data science in general is heavily entwined with Python and various open source libraries such as pandas or numpy. There is a bit of R in this course and of course there is no reason you can’t calculate the mean geometric or otherwise in Excel or SQL or the programming language of your choice, but to complete this course you must learn a little Python.

Who is this course for?

Investment professionals is right in the title. A lot of people register for the CFA Program who don’t seem fully committed to reference W. H. Auden and amazingly I remembered the exact poet and line from his poem. I’m not even sure I’ve read any W. H. Auden, if I did it would have been a long long time ago. Gappy will be so proud of me. He’s trying to bring more poetry into finance. I myself tried but the poet I chose was William Blake.

So as I was saying before I got poetically sidetracked, this course is aimed at investment professionals so people who already have experience in the investment industry. It can be used as professional learning credits for the CFA or CIPM. Despite how heavily it was marketed to me I’m not sure I was the target audience. It is true I did finish the CFA program a number of years ago before they added Python to the curriculum but I took the initiative and learned Python myself reading several books and even taking an online course.

This course is aimed at someone less technical than me. The CFA Institute spends considerable time going on about the t-shaped team and they see the person who completes this certificate as fitting into a very specific role on a data science or machine learning project in the investment industry. One of the best parts of the entire course is when they interview industry professionals about how they use AI, data science, and machine learning at their firm.

I don’t think there are any prerequisites for this course. You do not have to be a CFA Charterholder, you do not need to know any Python or even statistics before starting this certificate. I do think it is targeted at people already in the industry rather than people fresh out of school or still in school who wish to become investment professionals. The course was developed to address a skills gap, but if you Google you won’t find much about the course, but reddit does have an opinion.

How long did it take to complete?

I really should have researched professional development courses more and since enrolling in this one I have, but I was being pressured to both spend my professional development budget for 2024 and become an expert or at least competent in AI and how it can be used in the investment industry. My official estimate on how long I spent on the course was 132 hours. It probably took me longer, the scars from the actual CFA program have not fully healed. I was taking no chances with this course, I made hundreds of flashcards, I did all the optional readings, I even had to dig deeper in some topics if the official 5 or 10 minute video was not a sufficient explanation.

Officially the five courses take approximately 100 hours to complete but I’ve also seen the CFA Institute say the certificate can be earned in 90-100 hours. You have one year to complete the courses, that is 365 days after you register. I’m not sure the CFA marketing machine is hooked up to their online learning platform as even after I was registered for the course, I was still getting emails encouraging me to register for the course. I was approximately 80% finished when they emailed me informing I had used up half of the time I would have access to the learning material.

Is it harder than the CFA Program?

No.

The old estimate for a single level of the CFA program was 300 hours, hence the website name. The CFA program also has 3 levels, so at most this certificate is one ninth as difficult as the CFA program and it is probably less difficult than that. The online is exam is not proctored for instance, although they do ask you not to use AI to answer questions in their AI course. I know the CFA has embraced online learning and I learned at a UVic alumni event that universities have embraced micro-credentials as well and that is what this is, it is closer to a micro-credential than a masters equivalent which is how the CFA Institute likes to market their flagship program.

How much Python did you learn?

Not much.

If you want to master Python this is not the course for you. It isn’t a programming certificate. You are not expected to write much Python at all. What is expected, is to be able to read and run Python scripts in coding labs. There is some language syntax you must learn, but it is more about developing awareness on what you can do with Python and what open source libraries are out there than writing new original code yourself.

Would I recommend this course?

I recommend you shop around. I am not as negative as the reddit community is about this course but it did cost a lot, well over $1000 USD. I was fortunate in that I could get it paid for by my firm, but I paid for my MBA and CFA programs myself. I’m long overdue to get on the gravy train. The course also did take me a significant investment of time, studying after work and on weekends. There are a lot of videos which I’m told the cool kids watch on 2X speed at least.

As mentioned above I previously took an online Python for Finance course. I was actually became competent at Python previously then the job I got didn’t really use it. Some people love their Excel spreadsheets and SQL Server databases. Now we may be finally using Python more at work. So all things considered, I recommend you shop around as there are lots of free or cheaper courses online, but my boss at the time was happy I chose this course because it ticks a lot of boxes, the CFA Institute’s name still carries weight in some circles and this course is definitely buzzword heavy.

Did I get a piece of paper?

No.

My coworker thought for sure given the cost and how long it was taking me I’d get a piece of paper I could frame and put on the wall. What I did get was six online badges!

COVID-19 had a big effect on the program and education in general. Apparently enrolment in the lengthy flagship CFA Program is down. In-person exams were of course cancelled and computerized exams became the norm. All the CFA exams I sat were completed with pencil/pen on paper. Towards the end of my time as a CFA candidate they introduced online practice problems and their system would keep track of your long run average so you didn’t have to do it in Excel or on paper. At some point the CFA Institute introduced online badges, originally using a company called Basno. Then more recently they must have developed their own online credentialing system.

The purpose of the online badges is to certify you actually completed the course as apparently many people lie on their resumes. I’ve been too honest for my own good, but I did share my completion of the courses and earning of the badges on LinkedIn and then one of the first things I updated on this website when I got it back working was my resume.

What’s next?

I probably spent too long on this certificate. I passed it with a decent enough score, you need to score 70% or above on basically everything. And there are five courses in this certificate and each course can have five or more modules and each module is likely to have it’s own final assessment plus there are number of must pass quizzes and assignments. Although it is probably possible to fast forward through the many videos, there are also PDFs you are expected to read. In fact at some point I found Data_Science_Certificate_Glossary.pdf which has all the glossaries for all the courses in a single document.

This is a useful overview of the material which the CFA Institute appears to have made available. As someone who got in trouble previously for posting a screenshot of the CFA Institute’s website and has spent years jumping through hoops and adding ® to the first occurrence of CFA on every webpage and blog post I have, I was hesitant to write about this course until it was finished. I also didn’t know if I should post any screenshots but since they are just graphs produced by open source libraries that is unlikely to violate their intellectual property rights. Somewhere it specifically said I could display my badges on my own website.

During this certificate, just like while I was in the actual CFA program I gave up on many hobbies, this includes miniature painting and all forms of gaming. I expended a lot of effort to finish the certificate, before I took my trip to Toronto and since completing the certificate have played a lot of Sid Meier’s Civilization VII. But I also registered for yet another online course, the other certificate I considered taking last year, that was marketed heavily to me via email and social media, the Certificate in Python for Finance. This will definitely require me to relearn a lot of things I’ve forgotten and hopefully will further improve my knowledge of all things data science, machine learning, and AI in Finance.

So miniature painting and gaming will likely have to wait until next year as will travelling abroad. My new online professional development course will take at least sixteen weeks and likely a lot longer as my job is quite demanding. I do hope to find time to play my new guitar more. If you have any thoughts on the CFA Institute, the courses it offers or professional development in general you can leave a comment below.

This entry was originaly posted on August 21st, 2025, it was last edited on August 21st, 2025 and is filed under: Personal Improvement and tagged: CFA®, Professional Development, Python.