3 ways to add data skills to your career portfolio for free

More than seven years ago Marc Andreessen penned a now famous essay in the Wall Street Journal headlined Why Software Is Eating The World (paywalled, sorry.) Most will agree he was right.

In 2016, Andreessen with associates Ben Horowitz, Scott Kupor, and Sonal Chokshi put out a podcast Software Programs The World. And while the soothsayers have yet to say it, Data Runs The World. Consider the 2016 elections, the widespread calls for data privacy laws and the five crazy 1000 point intra-day swings of the stock market in 2018. It is beginning to seem as if training in data will be required just to be a responsible citizen.

As we approach the fourth quarter of 2020 , it’s especially important for anyone who works with data to update their career portfolios with data skills. Even if they did so last year. Technology stacks are constantly changing and being a master at something that isn’t used anymore could put you last in line when it comes to working on important and interesting projects. Not only that, but expertise in data engineering and data analytics, for example, will make you one of the most highly sought after tech professionals in the industry. This according to burningglass, the world’s largest provider of labor market data.

This doesn’t mean that you have to spend a big bucks and take six weeks off from work to skill-up. Here are a few ways to add data skills to your portfolio for free:

Amazon offers 19 introductory labs via qwikLabs.com. They are geared toward working in the Amazon ecosystem. Courses in Amazon Machine Learning, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RedShift and others might be of interest.

How does Uber figure out whether it should offer $4.99 or $6.99 for the next ride? It uses Presto, a high performance, distributed SQL query engine for big data. Its architecture allows users to query a variety of data sources such as Hadoop, AWS S3, Alluxio, MySQL, Cassandra, Kafka, and…