From the course: Introduction to Career Skills in Data Analytics

Data engineers

From the course: Introduction to Career Skills in Data Analytics

Data engineers

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- It is one thing to refine and add to a data set. It's an entirely different skill to be able to build data sets. I personally believe what most people consider, as a data analyst in their organization, may be performing data engineering tasks more than analysis tasks. The crossover between the analysts and the engineering and skills are real. They share a lot of common foundational skills. A data engineer is someone who fully understands how to look at the data sets, knows how to refine them into smaller more sensible sets for people to use. You may receive data from someone who is engineering that data from a set of queries, and then providing it to you or others. A data engineer also is likely to have more access to data, which is why they're sending it to you in the first place. They also understand security and privacy of data through the overall data governance strategy. Data engineers can transition to data architect, which covers more systems, more server and more security strategies for systems across all of the organization. If you want to grow further in this role, you will certainly need to understand more about structured and unstructured data and how to convert it to usable data sets. You'll want to understand the design methodologies of relational database systems and you will need to understand how to design databases. You'll also want the shared skills of communication, effective presentations, critical thinking, and active listening. These skills will be used to learn how to take hundreds of tables to define them into usable tables for other processes using ETL or ELT, which is extract, transform, and load or extract, load, and transform. This is how data goes from a production system to a data warehouse, as an example. I believe there is a lot of opportunity for data analysts to pursue this role as they grow deeper in their understanding of data and infrastructure.

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