11. AI & Machine Learning

8 certs | ~$1,325

Target Certifications

• AWS Certified AI Practitioner — $100
• AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate — $150
• AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional — $300
• NVIDIA AI Infrastructure and Operations Associate (NCA-AIIO) — $125
• NVIDIA Generative AI with LLMs Associate (NCA-GENL) — $125
• NVIDIA Generative AI with LLMs Professional (NCP-GENL) — $200
• NVIDIA Agentic AI Professional (NCP-AAI) — $200

Anthropic (Because I'm a FanBoy)

• Anthropic Academy — Free (completion certificates included)
  • Claude Code in Action
  • Claude 101
  • AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations
  • Building with the Claude API
  • Introduction to Model Context Protocol
  • Model Context Protocol: Advanced Topics
  • Introduction to Agent Skills
  • Claude with Amazon Bedrock

What You'll Learn

AI/ML fundamentals, model training & deployment, data pipelines, feature engineering, MLOps, responsible AI, cloud-based ML services, generative AI, LLMs, agentic AI, prompt engineering

Suggested Learning Path

1. Complete all Anthropic Academy courses (free) and NVIDIA DLI self-paced courses (free)
2. Take freeCodeCamp's ML course and study with AWS Skill Builder AI/ML paths
3. Take AWS AI Practitioner first, then ML Engineer Associate, then branch into NVIDIA or GenAI certs

Study Guides

• AWS Certified AI Practitioner Study Guide: Foundational (AIF-C01) Exam — Vikram Elango, Vivek Gangasani, Shreyas Subramanian (Sybex, 1st Edition, 2025)
• AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer Study Guide: Associate (MLA-C01) Exam — Dario Cabianca (Sybex, 1st Edition, 2025)
• Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow — Aurélien Géron (O'Reilly, 3rd Edition, 2022)
• Designing Machine Learning Systems — Chip Huyen (O'Reilly, 1st Edition, 2022)
• AI Engineering — Chip Huyen (O'Reilly, 1st Edition, 2025)