My one-year experience as a junior data analyst in Italy!
After graduating from Politecnio di Torino (PoliTo), I began working as an intern in a company that has an agreement with the university; as a result, I joined the company directly after graduation. Assume I graduated on December 20, 2022, and began working on January 9, 2023!
So officially, I began my first job experience abroad! 🤓🥳
After completing my six-month internship, I had another six months with a working contract.
Challenges
The challenges I came across were mostly related to the soft skills, which I explain it in more details. The first and the most important is language barrier! For almost three years of studying in English, I didn’t need or convince myself to learn Italian, because I was in the academic environment and there were full of international students and professors talking mostly in English, so when I come to the corporate world I felt the need to know Italian very well. (Welcome to Italy! 🤷🏻♀️🇮🇹)
You must know Italian in order to participate in meetings, write emails, communicate with clients, or even have a short conversations at coffee breaks or lunchtime!
So not knowing Italian had an impact on a variety of things, including interacting with people, attending meetings, understanding documentation or stakeholder’s business and consequently you feel isolated, lacking confidence, bored, and unable to integrate or fitting.
To be positive, my understanding of Italian has improved during this period, and I have been able to have some little conversations with my colleagues, but it takes time and you and your employer should be patient and supportive in this path.
Okay, let’s have a look at the technical point or hard skills.
Technical Tools
I mainly used Tableau and Looker Studio for data visualisation, SQL for writing simple queries data extraction, Google Analytics (GA4) for analysing users behaviour on the website, Google Tag Manager (GTM) for tracking user events and actions on the website, and Excel for data cleaning, and ad-hoc analysis. In my spare time I began reviewing Python from scratch, although in this job, I rarely need to develop.
As someone who only used Excel like a regular user, I needed to improve my knowledge of it, so I recommend you to take an Excel course or learn it on your own to get familiar with Conditional formatting, Formulas, Pivot charts, Macros, VLookup, and some useful shortcuts that help you do things faster.
The last two apps I recommend are Notion for taking notes and categorising my learnings for my Google Cloud Certificate journey, which functions similarly to personal documentation.
The second is to have a profile on Kaggle, the largest AI and ML community, which is a kind of GitHub for developers, which I think is useful if you are a ML engineer, data engineer, or data analyst.
During this experience, I had the opportunity to learn about Google Cloud for Data Engineer role, because the company I was working for had a partnership with Google for cloud, and I even I attempted to obtain the official Google Cloud Data Engineer certification.
Resources for my learnings
Okay, let’s see which tutorial I used to help me in this journey:
- For Excel: I used this course in the LinkedIn learning, Excel: Tips and Tricks and was useful for me.
- For Python: I used w3schools for Python.
- For Tableau: mostly I learnt by watching youtube tutorial.
- For Google Cloud Data Engineer: I had different sources, there are many materials, but I focused on these:
- Coursers: Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Cloud Data Engineer Professional Certificate
- Google Cloud Skills Boost: Data Engineer Learning Path
- Book: Official Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer Study Guide
- Exam Topics: a website to learn about similar exam questions. (after finishing the above resources)
The sad news is I failed in the exam, because as written in the Google official site for this certificate you need to have 3+ years of industry experience including 1+ years designing and managing solutions using Google Cloud, and just studying the materials isn’t enough; you also need hands-on experience with various scenarios, which I didn’t have in that company.
Anyway this preparation was really useful for me because I learnt about one cloud technology for processing and storing different types of data, understanding data pipelines and other topics.
Suggestions
If you plan to stay in Italy, even for only a short time, start studying Italian from the first day. I know it will be difficult to manage improving technological skills while also learning a new language, but understanding the language will level up your life and career in Italy, believe me.
I understand that you may have some doubts about it at first, such as why I should learn another language when everyone else speaks English! But let’s look at it this way: you travel to another country, you accept the challenges that come to your way, and eventually you also become bilingual.
I hope you enjoyed reading about my experience working in Italy. This is my first time writing here, so I was quite excited 🥹 and let me know your feedback about it.
Thank you for your time and have a nice day! ✨
