Six weeks or six months? Pick a length you'll finish.

The most common question on a counselling call is not "what will I learn" but "how long will it take". It is the right question. The length you choose decides whether you finish, and finishing is the only thing that produces the portfolio.

What learners say they want

Great Learning's report found that 64% of Indian learners prefer programs of six weeks to six months, and that preference has shifted from Master's degrees towards shorter certificate programs over the last year ¹. The same report puts the biggest barrier at office work, named by 37%; 25% of women name family responsibilities ¹.

Emeritus's India study adds the format: 79% prefer hybrid learning and 48% are open to fully online ². "Hybrid" is not defined on the page, so we read it loosely as "live teaching plus material I can use in my own time".

These are vendor surveys and should be read as a direction, not a decimal. But the direction is unambiguous: people want something short enough to see the end of, run on a timetable that respects a job.

Why short beats free

The best-known data on self-paced courses is unflattering. A study in Science of edX courses found that about 3% of participants completed a course in 2017–18, down from about 6% in 2014–15, and that 52% of registrants never started at all ³. That study is old and it covers free courses, which is exactly the point: with no timetable, no cohort and no money on the line, almost nobody finishes.

We could not find recent India-specific completion data for paid self-paced courses, so we won't invent a number. What we can say is what the structure does. A live class at a fixed time, a mentor who notices when you are missing, and a project due next week are not luxuries. They are the completion mechanism.

How long each kind of program should be

We set our lengths in September 2026 on one rule, and we use it everywhere: on the site, in the brochures, on the call.

The program teaches	Length
One tool, end to end (Power BI, Tableau, Alteryx, SQL, EDA with Python)	12 to 16 weeks
Two tools that work together (SQL with Power BI or Tableau; Excel with SQL)	16 to 20 weeks
A multi-tool programme (data analytics, BI and automation, DevOps, full stack, UI/UX, marketing, data science)	24 to 36 weeks

The range, not a single number, because the pace is yours. The timetable is fixed — two evenings a week and a weekend lab, recorded the same day — and the range says how long people take to work through the modules at a normal working pace. Faster if you can give more hours, slower if a month at work gets in the way. Nobody is timed out.

Picking your length, honestly

Three questions we ask on the call:

1. How many hours a week can you give, really? Not on a good week. On the week the quarter closes. If the answer is six, a one-tool program at 12 to 16 weeks is right. If it is ten, a programme becomes possible.
2. Do you need one tool or a role? Someone already doing reporting in Excel who needs Power BI needs one tool. Someone moving from MIS into an analyst role needs the sequence: SQL, a BI tool, automation, and the AI layer.
3. Who pays? Only about a third of Indian professionals get employer funding, and 35–40% of prospective learners are put off by cost ⁴. Shorter programs cost less; instalments spread the rest. Both are stated in writing before any payment, and the refund window is seven days.

The wrong answer is the longest program you can imagine finishing. The right answer is the shortest one that gets you to something you can show, then the next one if you need it.