On Learning... Continuous Learning

Hello friends, I am not sure I have said Happy New Year, so Happy New Year, Friends 🥳! I hope the year is going according to plan and you are making this year your own!

If you have not read my last article, where I solved a Senior Data Engineer Code Challenge, read it HERE.

Now, let's get into this article! In data engineering, we often find that there are many tools and services in the ecosystem. In fact, I like to joke that there are more tools than data engineers with over ten years of experience in the ecosystem. That said, I feel we don't talk enough about being personally resilient about our growth and learning after we reach a certain level.

Recently, I had to learn GO — the programming language, to carry out some data engineering tasks, and I found it quite difficult. This was probably because I hadn’t learnt anything from scratch in a while, which I found surprising. After all, I‘d like to think I embody a culture of continuous learning, but somehow, I haven’t been doing it in a minute. This gave me some pause.

It made me realize it is easy to get comfortable with the knowledge you have, but the problem is knowledge gets stale, so to be the best in your chosen field, you have to be aggressive about your growth and learning.

This means

• You should not wait for your company to enrol you in courses—you should take responsibility for your own learning and development.
• You should not wait till you have time — there will never be enough time.
• You should not wait for someone to tell you what to learn — actively try new tools and technologies. If you've done it with Azure, do it again with AWS or Google.
• You should also pay attention to non-technical skills — How fast you can create a pipeline is not the only skill that matters; soft skills do too.

If you consistently incorporate these, you will always have multiple career options, growth opportunities, and confidence. Go learn something new this week! Cheers!

Photo by Chris Reyem on Unsplash

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Your biggest cheerleader
Jennifer