About the Palantir Foundry Certification Program

In January 2022, Palantir announced their Palantir Certification Program for Foundry. In the words of Palantir themselves, the program has three goals:

1. Provide an opportunity for users to highlight their Foundry knowledge, skills, and abilities, while their employers will be able to accelerate their transformation by identifying and scaling Foundry users.
2. Increase the impact of Palantir’s software by leveraging more of their IT and data support network in the Foundry operating system.
3. Infuse operations with intelligence by setting standards for using data to help transform organizations rather than just modernizing them. With its Certification program, Palantir is accelerating and expanding the productization of its approach.

At KatalystDI, almost everyone uses Foundry due to the tool’s ability to aggregate data sets that are traditionally difficult to join, or would otherwise require coding skills. As a data team, it streamlines our job by allowing us to concentrate on the Why of our work rather than worrying about How it gets accomplished.

My Experience with the Palantir Foundry Certification Program

Before I share my experience with the Palantir Foundry Certification program, I’ll give a little bit of background about myself and the work I do. I’ve been with Katalyst for a little less than a year now as a data analyst. I’ve been working with Foundry since the day I started; Foundry is basically my life. In a future blog my colleague Colten will discuss more of the nuance of what we use Foundry for, however, generally speaking you can categorize the work I do into the following buckets:

• Ingesting and uploading large amounts of data,
• Creating custom integrations between platforms,
• Cleansing then anonymizing data,
• Preparing data to be viewed by others in a meaningful way, &
• Data aggregation and cleansing. 

My recommendations for getting started with Palantir Foundry

1. First, understand if Foundry is the right tool for the job at hand. If you are taking a jump from spreadsheets where you are already manipulating large amounts of data from multiple sources and need something that is simple to set up and work with, Foundry is a great tool. If you aren’t familiar with managing data and connecting applications or going from data cleanup to analysis and data pipeline stuff it may seem intimidating but all the tools are there in the documentation. If you are just trying to sift through one data source, Foundry may not be the right fit for you. Often in the latter cases, it’s easier to use built-in analytics or dashboarding tools that are native to your original application.
2. If Foundry is indeed the correct tool for your scope or role then you can get started by reading and reviewing the documentation created by Palantir Technologies. Depending on your focus or the concentration you would like to utilize Foundry for, you can find relevant documentation broken down into sections (Integrations, Ontology, Analytics, etc).
3. After reviewing the documentation, you can sign up for the Palantir Foundry Academy, which is native in the platform. The Academy is an interactive tool that contains both coursework and practical exercises via a track-your-clicks model for instance: “Create this chart by clicking on this.”  the tool will then give you a checkmark showing that you have completed the task.
4. After that, I would suggest just diving in. I studied for the tests and passed on the first try. I found my day-to-day work to be extremely useful for getting additional practice on top of the studying I did through the Palantir Academy.

My final thoughts on the Palantir Foundry Certification Program

If you’re just getting started with Foundry, the certification is invaluable for learning Palantir’s best practices. As our organization scales, we take comfort in knowing that we set up integrations the correct way so that in the future we don’t have to go back and redo our work. In addition, the certification program was an amazing way to get hands-on experience working on parts of the tool that I plan to leverage in the future but don’t necessarily have an application for today. I feel confident that as customers bring me new problems, I’ll have the practical experience to solve their challenges.