Tools to get lucky as a Data Engineer?

In your path to becoming a Data Engineer, you’ll get familiar with a good number of tools. Some might be a result of your environment and others you’ll be able to choose to learn.

A group of tools will be pretty obvious like SQL or Python. By your own decision or because of the environment you’ll get familiar with them. These are pillars for your Data Engineer career. But not what I want to write about today.

There is another set of obscure tools that could help you land a great job or get picked for a cool project. By obscure I mean they are not very popular. That also means that not a lot of people know them. In that scarcity lies a lot of their power.

Companies sometimes require someone with experience or a certification in a specific tool. Could be an ETL or Visualization tool. Most of the time they built something and now need someone who can support it. They took an odd decision a while ago and know nobody knows how to keep to solution alive.

If you know other similar tools you might be able to pick them up pretty quickly. Maybe in a couple of weeks. Sometimes the client does not have a couple of weeks.

The question is: how can you find and leverage these tools?

Document somewhere the tools you use for each project. Make sure to put those names somewhere in your CV. You might think Hiring Managers only care about big names (Python, SQL, Scala…) but sometimes they might see an obscure tool and say: we could use that on our team.

You could try to get a certification or a short online course on these tools. This is the kind of time investment that might not be too high and the prize can be interesting.

I would also recommend framing these tools as small bets. Don’t invest too much in a specific one. These bets don’t pan out all the time, but sometimes they do.

If you’ve come so far this down you might be interested in learning more. I created this course that can help you get hired as a Data Engineer.