What I Would Learn Today to Progress as a Data Engineer
4 areas of focus to boost your career in as little as 4 weeks
After 10 years of building data solutions and mentoring data engineers, I’ve found that a few key areas of focus can speed up your progression in your data career by years. You don’t need to accumulate years of experience to climb the ladder rung after rung. Instead, you can leapfrog forward in as little as a few months.
In this post, I’ll show you exactly what I would learn today if I were looking to progress as a data engineer.
1. Understand the Why
Most technical courses are way too prescriptive, showing you how to solve a specific problem in a perfect world scenario. Sometimes they even straight up tell you what to do — thinking this is learning is INSANE.
This isn’t setting you up for success. You will only ever achieve short-term gains that help you solve immediate problems. Because of this, I see data engineers time and time again use technologies that are simply overkill for their situation because they don’t understand when and why they should be used.
Instead, what you should learn is the bigger picture of why this skill or technology is useful so you know when to use it going forward.
