I thought I would put out a brief post to help people looking for work, just my opinion on skills that will help land you a job. I am avoiding dev because the ramp up can be significant.
1. Learn linux - specifically the command line (distro is largely irrelevant but ubuntu and rhel are popular and well supported)
2. Learn SQL and a visualization tool (tableau/excel), practice analyzing a few open-source datasets and drawing insights from them, then map them out using the visualization
3. Learn about some data engineering concepts (data lakes, data storage, compression, accessibility and security)
4. Learn about some networking and internet concepts (protocols, DNS, IPs, ports)
5. Learn about the cloud computing in general (what it is, how its used - bonus points a lot of providers have free tier for practice)
Set practical's up for yourself using the above elements (if you don't have Linux installed you can use something like virtual box and run on your windows machine).
Example challenges
- Set up SQL on a server and use another machine to submit queries and retrieve results.
- Set up a LAMP stack
- Set up a DNS server
- Do all of the above automatically using bash scripts
IT is a really secure space during this time, so its a worthwhile investment if you have the spare time, Sites like edx and even youtube have stacks of free courses/content. Importantly, keep track of your learning path and take notes along the way, artifacts like these are gold in an interview to show that you are a self-starter and willing to learn.
Anyone else in the field feel free to tack onto this list
1. Learn linux - specifically the command line (distro is largely irrelevant but ubuntu and rhel are popular and well supported)
2. Learn SQL and a visualization tool (tableau/excel), practice analyzing a few open-source datasets and drawing insights from them, then map them out using the visualization
3. Learn about some data engineering concepts (data lakes, data storage, compression, accessibility and security)
4. Learn about some networking and internet concepts (protocols, DNS, IPs, ports)
5. Learn about the cloud computing in general (what it is, how its used - bonus points a lot of providers have free tier for practice)
Set practical's up for yourself using the above elements (if you don't have Linux installed you can use something like virtual box and run on your windows machine).
Example challenges
- Set up SQL on a server and use another machine to submit queries and retrieve results.
- Set up a LAMP stack
- Set up a DNS server
- Do all of the above automatically using bash scripts
IT is a really secure space during this time, so its a worthwhile investment if you have the spare time, Sites like edx and even youtube have stacks of free courses/content. Importantly, keep track of your learning path and take notes along the way, artifacts like these are gold in an interview to show that you are a self-starter and willing to learn.
Anyone else in the field feel free to tack onto this list