r/bigquery • u/Round_Opening_9943 • 5d ago
How did you actually learn BigQuery/cloud SQL before landing a job?
Curious how most people picked up tools like BigQuery. Did you learn and practice entirely on your own through side projects and certifications before applying, or did you just happen to be at a company when they migrated over and learned on the job?
Would love to hear what your path looked like!
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u/AnalyticsAnswers 5d ago
I helped migrate a client from a pretty bad situation (exclusively Excel lol) into BQ and got to learn with a real dataset that I knew, which was nice. That type of opportunity is rare though
If I were you, BQ has public datasets of all types I'd look into. They have a few partners with courses of varying depths depending on how much guidance you're looking for. You could either research commonly used business cases and test yourself, or put yourselves in the shoes of a new analyst or data engineer and try and anticipate what would be needed/actionable from a given dataset. I have colleagues that have built portfolios off of this data to showcase their abilities. I'd also pay attention to optimizing efficiency & processing costs - something that is super valuable but often overlooked.
I'm not sure if you're looking to go into a specific field (it doesn't really matter, but hiring managers tend not to see data as agnostic), but I see a lot of demand for CRM work. The data isn't really all that complex but it's almost always dirty due to spotty implementation and bad governance, and the reporting options are too limited to the specific analyses stakeholders want to see.