Data Engineering Career: Unleashing The True Potential of Data

Albert Christopher
5 min readJan 31, 2024
Data Engineering Career: Unleashing The True Potential of Data

Data engineering enables data users across the enterprise with clean, quality data they can trust, so they can enhance with better business inputs and actions. Data engineering is the result of the technology disruption of big data. Overall, the industry is shifting towards data management environments that give better insights from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) while leveraging the way for agility.

What is Data Engineering?

Data engineering is the process of developing and building systems for collecting, storing, and analyzing data. It is a huge area with many applications in several industries. Many organizations have collected large amounts of data, and they need data infrastructure and personnel to sort and analyze the information.

Data engineers perform several tasks, such as data ingestion, processing, transformation, and storage. They work closely with data scientists and analysts to understand their data demand and design robust data pipelines, which can efficiently and reliably process data at scale. They can also effectively manage and process data from disparate sources by using cutting-edge tools and technologies such as extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) frameworks, databases, data warehouses, and data lakes.

Data Engineering Career

Data engineers help data scientists and data analysts get the proper and resourceful data, make it available in their environment, and be sure the data is reliable, and that sensitive data is masked ensures less time to be spent on data preparation, as well as to function related to the data engineering pipelines.

A data engineer applies data engineering discipline to tame raw data and make it useful for downstream users. Several individuals are actively choosing a data engineering career because it is considered one of the most lucrative career options. There are several companies globally such as IBM, Quid, Saffron, Good Data and Bluefin Labs that are actively employing big data engineers in huge numbers.

Essentials to Become a Data Engineer

If an individual is aiming to be a part of this growing industry, then they must know a few aspects that will help them to ace their career in data engineering.

👉 Get Proficient in the right Programming Languages

As there is no specific university curriculum for data engineering, the data engineer is a software engineer first. So, one is required to possess sound knowledge of the programming languages that are highly used by data engineers. SQL is the main programming language data engineers use extensively to make and manage relational databases. After that, they also use Python or R programming languages because they are very helpful for modeling and statistical analysis. If one wants to become proficient in their foundational skills related to programming languages then doing a data engineering certification will be very helpful, where they can understand the implementation of these programming languages in real-time.

👉 Develop Soft Skills

It is very important to enhance one’s communication skills to be part of this growing field. To be among the professional data engineers one must possess the following qualities:

  • Communication skills

The data engineer job role demands interacting with many such as stakeholders to know their demands before processing further.

  • Ability to design

In their job role, a data engineer creates simple creative designs where the architecture is not overly done.

  • Detail Oriented

Data quality plays an essential role in developing data pipelines. The quality and integrity of the data in the pipeline will determine the quality of the rest of the task.

👉 Get professional data engineering certifications

Pursuing a data engineer certification will surely enhance an individual’s skills before beginning their career in this space. Certification bestows excellent knowledge and guidance by offering exposure to real-time projects. There are many industry-recognized certifications, which empower one’s career. A few of the certifications include:

  • MongoDB Certified Developer

This certification is very useful for big data projects. The aspirants can prepare for this with the help of MongoDB online training programs. The knowledge of aspirants will be tested on topics related to MongoDB, horizontal scaling, disaster recovery of data, and fault tolerance. There are no certain prerequisites to choosing this certification and this is perfect for those individuals who want to prove their capability to work on big data in a NoSQL platform.

  • Data Science Council of America (DASCA) certifications

Data Science Council of America (DASCA) is an industry-recognized certification body that offers data engineering certifications. DASCA provides each individual with the best acumen and capabilities to anticipate and appreciate the demand to deploy the latest Data Science techniques, tools, and concepts to take care of as well as to harness Big Data across several different verticals, environments, and markets. DASCA tests each individual’s abilities with the world’s most robust generic data science knowledge framework.

Associate Big Data Engineer (ABDE™)

The Associate Big Data Engineer certification acts as proof that a person has taken a big step in mastering the field of data engineering. The skills and knowledge one can get by doing this certification will help them to stay ahead of the competition.

The ABDE™ is designed for graduate students of computer science, information technology, computer applications, and programming. It is also about the interest to exceed the expectations of organizations that their data engineers must be transformational, visionary, and insightful. This credential offers in-depth insights into popular big data platforms, like Hadoop and Spark, and knowledge of proprietary and open-source developer tools like HBase, Hive, Pig, and HiveQL. It is required to pass a 75-question online exam. This credential

End Notes

The Data Engineer job role is in high demand in various industries globally. If an individual wants to start their career in the field of data engineering, they must enhance their skill set and do a certification program that offers better knowledge. It is highly recommended to stay updated with the latest technologies to enjoy a rewarding career in the tech’s quickest booming sectors.

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Albert Christopher

AI Researcher, Writer, Tech Geek. Contributing to Data Science & Deep Learning Projects. #coding #algorithms #machinelearning