The Data Skills You’re Working on Today Are Not The Ones You’ll Need a Decade From Now

As new tools and technologies make technical data tasks trivial, the demand for data “soft” skills will sky-rocket.

It happened about two years ago.

I was tasked to build a pipeline to pull marketing data from the Amazon Marketing Services API into our database. I cracked my knuckles, opened up a text editor, and started framing out the code to build a data integration using Python.

I got a message from my boss: “Have you heard of Open Bridge?” I did a quick google search. Open Bridge was another offering in the automated ETL world. I had used tools like Xplenty and Stitcher before — so I thought I knew what would happen next.

Over the next week, I discovered the simplicity of Open Bridge. The extent of the user experience is typing in credentials and hitting submit. Within a day we had the full suite of AMS reports automatically dropping into our Azure Blob storage account every 24 hours. All I had to do was set up a pipeline to merge the respective CSV files into corresponding database tables, and I was done.

It was when our first payment for Open Bridge came through that I realized how much the Data job market is going to change over the next decade. The bill for the service? $150 a month.