this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)

Asklemmy

43340 readers
2067 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

By employed I mean get a job in the industry either offline or online. Ideally something that would highly likely remain in-demand in the near future.

top 9 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It really depends on where you're coming from. I've known several people who made a rather successful transition from a more business oriented position to business intelligence. It's like data science's older and less sexy brother :) General domain knowledge of business processes and finances are always a positive and IT knowledge for a junior can consist of as little as SQL knowledge and experience with a reporting and ETL tool.
You don't get to do a lot of programming, but there's always demand for people capable of building a proper data warehouse or able to translate an information request in a properly build report. Internal positions are often an option because companies like to retain people with expert knowledge of the inner workings of their information systems.

Source: I used to be a BI specialist for ten years or so :)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for replying with valuable info!

What's the first step in this direction you'd recommend now?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Learn SQL and data modelling. The Data Warehouse Toolkit by Ralph Kimball is a good introduction to data warehouses and dimensional modelling. It's not a universal model for data warehouses, but the core concepts remain the same among different implementations. This should give you a good basic understanding of the basic concepts of data warehousing.

I know Reddit isn't exactly popular here, but their business intelligence community is quite active. It might be a good place to lurk and gain some insights.

Best of luck! :)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Thank you! Is SQL and data modelling the most in-demand IT-related thing I can learn these days to get employed remotely?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Oof, I wouldn't know about that. I was purely talking from personal experience. I don't have a good picture of the job market in total, let alone in whichever country you live. If you want to get into the data-related IT fields (data analist, data engineer, business intelligence specialist, etc.) then SQL and data modeling skills are a must-have. But it's just a small part of a much bigger discipline.

If possible, find some professional career counseling. Someone with better knowledge of the job market where you live might give you some good advice on which steps to take first.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I've been in search of a career counselor online but couldn't find anything worthwhile. Any advice on who I could talk to?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

No, I'm sorry. I wish I could help but I'm a bit out of my depth with this one. You might try a local career counselor, but that really depends on where you live and who's available.

I wish you the best of luck though, I hope you'll find what you're looking for.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm a self-taught sysadmin. It took me ~3 years to get comfortable, and I'm srill learning stuff that feels like if not 100-level then at most 200-level course knowledge...

I started making a pivot to self-taught pentesting in hopes of breaking into red-teaming, but I'm stuck at finding time to practice and learn and still invest some time in the parts of life that aren't my job and/or future job. I enjoy doing it just for fun outside of the career potentials, but I've been burnt out for years from turning my current career into my hobby as well, I won't make that mistake again

I guess the only answer I have is: depends on how much time you plan on investing in self-teaching. I wouldn't say anything's necessarily out of reach, but I would say that learning the skills is only half the battle of getting employed.

I do have a little advice with my perspective: don't think of it in large timeframes, e.g. "I wan't to get to this goal within a year," do it in hours or less. Force yourself to sit down and do something that furthers that goal for X amount of hours each day; that way, you have a very clear metric and can start measuring progress by how much time you actually spent studying and applying for jobs and networking (as in building relationships with your peers and future employers... but also the other kind too).

Oh, another piece of advice: don't just read, watch videos and listen to lectures—learn by doing. Set up a home lab for whatever it is. At least a solid 80% of what you'll encounter in the field can be emulated with a good enough PC and the right software (yes, even cabling). And for everything else... Well, that's just good fun to own all those tools and gadgets and gizmos galore and so, so, SO much cable of every kind.

Last bit: are you having fun? If it's not fun to learn, it'll be soul-crushingly, mind-numbingly dull when it's your job. You don't get to do the cool new stuff most days, most days it's just replying to emails and forcing the users to restart while you observe because most of the time "Yeah, I already did that" means "I may not understand computers in the least, but I'm inexplicably dead certain that the thing the expert is telling me to do won't work." So make sure you're enjoying even those bits now

Otherwise, get out now while you still can and the Sunk Cost Fallacy hasn't kicked in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Also: See what the enterprise sector uses and try to aquire NFR licenses to get the full spectrum of the tool set. (Veeam for example gives out 1 year NFR licenses by just giving them your name and an email).