I'm in the mid-age crisis here... I have a bachelor's degree in Computer Information Systems, and been working so many different roles and projects ever since I graduated. Here's a quick summary of the roles and projects that I played so far: QA (manual testing) - 1 year IT BA (web/mobile app, data warehousing, system migration, data migration, business process improvements) - 5 years SAS data analyst - 2 years IT PM (web app) - 1 year Most of the projects that I worked as a consultant lasted about 1 year or 2, so I neither have a strong business domain knowledge in the area I worked in nor gained super strong technical knowledge or skills (such as data warehousing) from each project. However, I learned quite a lot about building a web/mobile app for the last 2 years using my spare time by building a mobile app myself (although I stopped in the middle as I didn't have too much time doing it anymore). And for my technical skills, I know SAS, Python (familiar, no actual work experience yet), JS (familiar), and SQL. Now, I'm trying to re-think my next career move and see what best fits for me based on my previous working experiences. I know that project management and product management are not something that I want to do. I'm thinking about Business intelligence or Data engineering but not sure how to start. So my questions are: 1. Which one of these best fits for me based on my background? Business intelligence or Data engineering? 2. How is the career outlook for Business Intelligence? I heard that a lot of companies are moving things from traditional reporting to data engineering. Is it true? 3. If my ultimate goal is data engineering, will business intelligence be a good starting point? 4. I'm thinking doing a masters or post-bacc or certification program. Will it help me to transit to Business intelligence or Data engineering? What school or program do you guys recommend?
1. Business Intelligence 2. The Data Engineer/Analytics Engineer job title has absorbed much of what used to be Business Intelligence Engineer. These can be used interchangeably depending on where you work. These can also be very distinct roles because there is no standardization of responsibilities. 3. It's a good starting point, but as mentioned in #2, you may find a DE role with your existing skillset. 4. It won't hurt but you won't need anything like that to move into BI/DE roles. You just need the right stuff on the resume.
Earlier Business Intelligence is both Dashboarding, DWH and ETL. Data Engineer is more of Big Data SWE. Now, BI in most of companies is dashboarding and analyst type role. ETL and coding part has been moved to Data Engineeer. BIE - SQL, Visualization, Tableau, DWH DE - SQL, PySpark, Python, DWH, ETL, Cloud, Big Data, Airflow DAGs. BIE is more of analyst role - less pressure, less jobs, less salary relatively compared to DE which is SWE kind of role but in data. Coming back to your questions. 1. You can pick anything based on based on coding skills. 2. Yes. Traditional BI won't stay fancy. 3. You may start as DE straight. No prerequisites. 4. Masters not needed. Practice Leetcode and Python programming. You may consider doing Databricks DE certification and revising DWH concepts.
will CS degree give me advantage getting into DE?
It doesn't matter. Even if you have degree, you have to adjust your resume with some DE experience. and All you need is to clear the coding interview. You can do it by grinding Leetcode. The DE interview is not that hard as SWE. You won't have to study graphs, Trees and Linkedlist kind of things, instead you have to do advanced SQL and Spark/DWH concepts. with CS degree, you can be a SWE, that's easy than DE.