Galvanize will make you a Big Data engineer for free, but there’s a catch

Technical education company Galvanize is offering a new course for interested students, starting this fall. Available only in San Francisco, students can enroll into the data engineering course to learn all about Big Data technologies.

But while an additional course may not sound all that interesting, there’s a twist: Galvanize will give students a full scholarship, but only if they work at tech firm Nvent after graduation for an unspecified period of time (that’s between the student and the company, VentureBeat is told).

For 12 weeks, students will participate in this $16,000 full-time program where they’ll learn about Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Storm, HBase, Solr, Cloud Computing, and Lambda Architecture. Galvanize will provide data engineering experts, industry partners, and others for students to learn from. It all culminates with Hiring Day, an opportunity for students to demo their projects to prospective employers.

Examples of what students will cover during this three-month immersive program include: advanced Java, databases, and relational systems; information architecture, advanced SQL, hive/pig; real-time data and streaming; and designing, modeling and planning distributed systems.

Nvent, a data analytics consultancy, will provide up to eight scholarships, along with a living stipend, to the first batch of students. The only requirement is that you commit to working full-time at Nvent as a consultant. This wouldn’t be an internship role — eligible students will be compensated just like other full-time employees.

“We’ve been consistently impressed with the expertise and knowledge of both Galvanize instructors and graduates,” says Nvent’s director of recruiting Ben Lieberman. “This is an amazing opportunity for anyone looking to launch a successful career in data engineering.”

Understanding Big Data has become increasingly important for many companies. Data provided by WANTED Analytics to Forbes indicates that the top five industries hiring Big Data-skilled individuals include: professional, scientific, and technical services; information technologies; manufacturing; finance and insurance; and retail trade.

What’s more, two of the top markets for Big Data employment happen to be in Silicon Valley, which is perhaps why Galvanize opted to make its data engineering program available only in San Francisco.

Classes begin on October 26, 2015 and will wrap up January 29, 2016.