Certificate pathway

Certificate of Completion Requirements

To earn your certificate of completion, complete a capstone project that demonstrates your ability to take data from raw form to actionable insights, communicate findings clearly, and strengthen your Employment Pathway with Ultimate CV Shortlisting-ready project evidence.

1) Dataset Selection

• Choose one dataset from the provided list, or use your own personal, professional, research, or publicly available dataset.

2) Data Preparation & Cleaning

• Document the initial raw dataset (size, structure, missing values, duplicates, outliers, data types, etc.).
• Perform and document cleaning steps:

• Handle missing values.
• Remove or treat duplicates.
• Fix inconsistent data formats.
• Handle outliers.
• Handle correlated features.
• Create new useful features (if applicable).

3) Business Questions

• Define at least 7 business questions your dataset can answer.
• Explain the importance and business value of each question.
• At least 2 questions must relate to feature impact on a target variable, prediction, or forecasting.

4) Visualisation

• Include visualisations (bar charts, scatter plots, etc.) to explore and answer your questions.
• Interpret each visualisation clearly.

5) Hypothesis Testing

• Formulate at least 2 hypotheses (for example: significant sales difference between Region A and Region B).
• Perform suitable statistical tests (t-test, chi-square, ANOVA, etc.).
• Report significance values and provide clear interpretation.

6) Predictive Analytics

• Build at least one predictive model using your dataset:

• Regression (continuous numeric target), or
• Classification (categorical target), or
• Time-series forecasting.

• Explain why the model was chosen.
• Present key metrics (accuracy, RMSE, R², etc.).
• Explain how results apply in business context.

7) Report & Presentation

Your presentation/report must include:

• Project overview and dataset description.
• Tools/software used.
• Business questions.
• Cleaning and analysis workflow.
• Visualisations with insights.
• Hypothesis testing results.
• Predictive model explanation and results.
• Business recommendations and conclusions.

Assessment Day Format (60 minutes)

• 25 minutes: Presentation
• 35 minutes: Questioning

Evaluation Criteria

• Completeness (all required components included)
• Clarity & Structure (well-organized, easy-to-follow report)
• Data Cleaning Quality (justification of cleaning choices)
• Depth of Analysis (business questions addressed thoroughly)
• Insightfulness (interpretation of results and recommendations)
• Technical Rigor (hypothesis testing and predictive modelling quality)
• Communication (professional, clear, and visually appealing delivery)