Top Skills for a Data Engineer

It’s not surprising that Data Engineers are in high demand. Their skills are greatly needed as companies deal with a deluge of data sources. And let’s face it...it’s not easy to acquire those skills.

You’ve got to prioritize the most important ones. But be smart about it too. Some skills require massive training and expertise--but if you know the shortcuts, you can accomplish in a few minutes what might otherwise take months.

The following chart provides a sampling of some of the top skills and responsibilities described in LinkedIn Blog Posts, as well as the associated tools, and available resources for quickly ramping up on those skills.

...and, we’ve also included a few shortcuts that allow you to expedite some of the more resource-intensive processes:

Skill	Tools	Sources for Education	Shortcuts
Build and maintain an enterprise data warehouse with cloud-based technologies	Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, IBM Db2, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse	University of Colorado (Coursera): Data Warehousing for Business Intelligence Specialization	Data Fabric
Cloud data storage	AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud	LinkedIn Learning--AWS Storage and Data Management IBM -- Introduction to Storage CBT Nuggets--Google Cloud Storage Online Training	No shortcuts
Building and maintain critical ETL processes	Talend, SSIS, Panoply	Coursera--Big Data Integration and Processing Udemy: ETL Testing--From Beginner to Expert Wiley: The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit: Practical Techniques for Extracting, Cleaning, Conforming, and Delivering Data	Promethium for Cloud Data Migration
Data Visualization	Tableau, PowerBI, Looker, Domo	LinkedIn Learning--Data Visualization: Storytelling Coursera -- Data Visualization, by University of Illinois	Self-service Analytics
Database design	SQL Server Database Modeler, Lucidchart	Udemy--SQL & Database Design A-Z™: Learn MS SQL Server + PostgreSQL Udacity--Database Systems & Design by Georgia Tech	No shortcuts
Expertise in SQL	SQL Server, OracleDB, MySQL, DbSchema, Visual Paradigm	W3Schools--SQL Tutorial Codecademy--LearnSQL	Data Discovery
Scripting languages for ETL	Python, Perl, Bash	Codecademy--Python LearnShell.org Udemy--Learn Pearl5 By Doing It	Promethium for Cloud Data Migration

ETL skills are a HOT commodity...

You may have picked up on a few of our not-so-subtle hints that ETL is a big deal for data warehouse engineers.

ETL is a complicated, lengthy and messy process, and a lot can go wrong. And even the most passionate Data Engineer may wish that they could close their eyes and ‘make it go away’, and focus on more fun parts of the job.

Want to learn about how you can create data pipelines and virtual warehouses without ETL? Promethium can SHOW YOU HOW.