Israel Tech Challenge

They give many promises that they cannot keep. Nobody got job assistance. Yes we did get some "sales" job suggestions after finishing a coding bootcamp. Especially the director called Inbar was the person I've ever met in my life... Just go to a different... Read More bootcamp where there are kind people

ITC does a great job of teaching you the actual skills you will need to be successful in a web developer role, and they do it with a very relevant real-world ""stack".

Trying to learn web development on your own can be very over-whelming. It's a huge topic,... Read More and it moves/advances incredibly quickly. ITC provides you with a curriculum that is actually what you NEED to know to be successful and they do it using technologies that are very popular in the industry.

On top of that they do a great job preparing you for, and landing you interviews for internships with tech companies in Tel Aviv. This part of the program I thought was equally as important as the classroom learning because getting your foot in the door is often the toughest part of getting into developer roles.

Overall I found the experience and support excellent. I was hired by the company that I interned for and have been working there as a Software Engineer ever since.

This course provided to me a lot of invaluable tools to enter the ML/AI job market.

I did the course at age 30.
Before starting the course, I had around 4 years of experience in the Israeli hi-tech industry in Software related positions (Full-Stack Web/Product... Read More in a startup I co-founded and Back-End/Data Engineer in a data-intensive startup).

I felt I lacked the practical and theoretical tools to apprehend the ML market and transition to a Machine Learning / Deep Learning position in the industry.

After considering options to transition and brainstorming with people in the industry / ITC alumni that shared their experience with me, I felt ITC Data Science Fellows track provided me the best value for time / investment to accomplish my goals.

Alternatives I considered were:
- studying online with Coursera, Udacity, Udemy and like
- taking a master's degress in CS / Statistics in a well-known university
- learn on the job slowly and hope to transition at some point to an ML position

Although I believe I could have acquired some of the tools provided by ITC with studying online / learning on the job, to me it felt would take too long to become proficient, and was lacking the significant advantage of being around teachers/mentors that are leading practitioners in the industry, with whom you can interact (ask questions, "best practices"), and a community of peers (that became great friends) that would work together on assignments, brainstorm best ways to solve problems.
A master's degree was out of scope because it involved too significant an investment of time and was less focused on industry.

Out of the many tools I got from this very intense 5-months experience, the ones I value the most are the numerous workshops organized by ITC partners that are industry leaders such as Outbrain, Taboola, SparkBeyond, Chorus, MobileEye (and much more), that provided opportunities to solve hands-on real-life data science problems (with real-life datasets, that you seldom find in toy problems from online tutorials) that involved the whole DS lifecycle: data acquisition, data cleaning / preprocessing, exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, data modelling (with both classical ML models and deep learning models) and data visualization in both NLP, Computer Vision and classical Machine Learning.

On top of the technical tools and frameworks to do proper data science work, the exposure to many companies in the Israeli ecosystem helped me map the options in the industry and understand well the different players in the ecosystem, and helped refine my job search strategy to what interested me most.

I am very glad about the personal project we did that allowed to practice an end-to-end NLP project in the domain of HR analytics, that involved Data Scraping from leading job boards, data cleaning and modeling with Topic Modeling (an NLP model), in order to identify clusters of skills relevant for specific job titles.

Last but not least, the part that was maybe the most significant to me was the project we did together with BMW company in the field of Satellite Imagery Analytics, which involved problems in the Computer Vision domain such as Object Detection, Classification and Semantic Segmentation.
The project involved data acquisition / exploration (around 40k instances), modeling and finally presentation of results to BMW Data Science leadership.

The modeling part involved Deep Learning frameworks such as Tensorflow Object Detection API, and PyTorch, using cutting-edge techniques such as Faster-RCNN, and SSD + VGG16.

The tools we used for this project (and were covered mostly during the course of the ITC training) are: pandas, scikit-learn, jupyter, matplotlib, Flask, Keras, Tensorflow, Docker, AWS EC2, AWS S3, Nvidia DIGITS framework.

If you feel I threw a lot of buzzwords in this review, and feel a bit lost with all of those, then you probably feel the same I did before taking ITC course.

I guarantee you that after taking the Fellows program, you will understand each and every one of those, and will know which part are they playing for the different tasks involved with Machine Learning / Deep Learning positions in the industry, and know how to combine them to create value from data.

I would probably have had little chance to reach my current position without the tools and exposure to the industry I got at ITC.
I am surely glad I got the chance to be part of this significant experience, and would recommend it warmly to anyone considering transitioning to the Data Science industry.

Thanks to ITC for the amazing initiative, and בהצלחה to you if you are considering entering this exciting journey :)

The ITC Fellows program (Data Science track) is perfect if you want to integrate the Israeli high tech ecosystem.
It is designed for Olim because it has contains also Ulpan but you can skip it if you are already fluent in hebrew.
The content of the courses... Read More are very relevant (intense) and constantly updated to (almost) the state of the art and definitely prepares for being a Data Scientist.
They have amazing partners so they help a lot finding your (first) israeli high tech job.
I highly recommend it

Israel Tech Challenge has been an amazing experience the whole way.
During the first months of training, you have to hold on and give the best out of you, cause this is where you will learn essential notions, tools and skills for your new career.
Later... Read More on, you will be able to tackle some real-world use cases from great Israeli companies.
When the time will come to start working on your own, in a professional environment, you will feel ready and confident, as I did.

ITC is also an amazing human adventure. I met fantastic people, and the intensity of the program strengthened our links.

Before ITC, I was stuck in the "can't find a job because I don't have experience"-"can't get experience because I don't have a job" cycle. The data science track provided me with the know how and connections I needed to land a job in high tech. This broke... Read More that vicious circle and with ITC and that job in my CV even more doors are open to me now. It completely changed my life.

I was working as a Data Analyst in an Israeli company.
I was doing great but I felt I wanted to do more. To go from data analyst to data scientist should have taken me few years.
Instead I did the Data Science Fellow program.
And within 6 months, I was... Read More a data scientist.
6 months instead of a few years :)
What is more to say?

Today, it's true you can learn everything online, mainly for free and especially for the coding area.
But once your resume is full of master degree / Coursera - Udemy - online course certification, reach the big companies even with an amazing resume is... Read More really complicated - almost impossible - especially in Israel where the networking is really important.
So yes, ITC will provide you 4 months of full learning but for me this was not the most important and benefic part.
What ITC will provide you that you will never find in any other places is :
- Hackaton organized with sponsors and with amazing sponsor
- A full month of workshops where you will have the opportunity to meet very cool, smart and interesting people from the best companies as Intel, Mobileye, Outbrain, Taboola, SparkBeyond, Similar web and start your own network ..
and .. the internship !!!
- The internship will allow you to work for 5 months in the top-10 israeli companies where - I talked from experience - it's almost impossible to reach for a data scientist job position without a senior experience but thanks to ITC you can do it.
And after this internship, the chance to be hired is very high and if not .. I can promise you to have a 5 months internship in one of the top-10 israeli companies will open you a LOT of doors.
So to put in a nutshell, I really recommend the ITC fellow program :)

It's a very intensive course. If you are motivated and have some technical background, it's an amazing way to learn one of the most required skill set in the high tech industry in only 4 month.
The teachers come from the top companies in the country and... Read More the lessons, while intense, are very good. The program also helped me a lot in finding my first job (always the hardest) in Israel.
If you are considering in giving your career a step forward, go with ITC.