The One Place You Can’t Learn SQL? A University

Despite being a job requirement for data engineering, data analyst and data science roles, institutions don’t teach SQL at the level of programming languages like Python, C++ and Java.

Photo by Pang Yuhao on Unsplash

Across industries SQL knowledge is imperative for any business or tech professional who interacts with data on a daily basis — but don’t expect to learn it in school.

Note: Although I’m skeptical of the degree to which SQL is taught in schools, it’s worth saying here that a lot of learning gaps I’ve encountered stem from both personal experience and data self-reported by computer science and data science students. My intent is not to disparage the data science curriculum of universities, but simply to wonder why isn’t SQL taught in an institutionalized way in the manner that languages like Python are?

SQL: A Critical Job Requirement

Although SQL is nearly 50 years old, the language is as relevant as ever as data engineers, data analysts and even data scientists leverage SQL to preprocess and analyze data. As of 2021 there were between 100–200,000 unique job postings per month that mentioned candidates must have knowledge of and proficiency in SQL. In 2021…