Big Data Career Without Coding?
Do all career options in Big Data demand skills with coding or administration? Big Data projects are in high demand right now, but skill sets for these projects come from different backgrounds. If you are wanting to get involved with Big Data, but don’t have a technical background watch the video to learn your options.
Options discussed in Non-Technical Careers in Big Data:
- Data Governance
- How Timely is the data?
- What is the source of all this data? Garbage in Garbage out
- Explain one of my first jobs in IT
- Project Management
- Agile Development
- Scrum Master
- DevOps
- Compliance & Security
- Huge Data Lakes need securing
- Huge potential with GDPR General Data Protection Requirements -Plug Alan Gates Interview
- How many different breaches do we hear about on daily basis
Video – Non-Technical Careers in Big Data
Transcript
Hi, folks! Thomas Henson here with thomashenson.com. Today is another episode of Big Data Big Questions. Welcome back to the new year. Our first thing that we’re going to tackle today in our first episode of Big Data Big Questions for 2018 is going to be non-technical jobs or career options inside of big data.
It’s submitted in from one of our YouTube users. You can find out more right after this.
Today’s question comes in from YouTube. Remember, if you have any questions around big data or anything that you want to ask and you want me to answer, you can submit those in our YouTube comments below on any of the videos, or you can go to my website at thomashenson.com/bigdataquestions. You can submit any questions there, and I’ll answer them as best I can on air, and give you my advice on the Hadoop community, or big data, or data engineers, or any questions that you have.
Today’s question comes in from YouTube, and it’s from Shahzad Khan. He says, “I work as a change manager, and I don’t know anything about Java or Hadoop, but I want to learn this technology. Is it all right for me to learn, since I’m not into coding? Also, I’ve never been involved in a development team, please suggest.”
Great question. Thanks for the comments and thanks for watching. Continue to watch. My first thing when I look at this is, we’ve talked about the ability, and I’ve had a couple other videos that you’ve seen where we’ve talked about, that you don’t have to know Java to be involved in Hadoop. If you have any questions around that, you can check into that. Really, I think this question, I want to frame it a little bit different, and think about, just because you want to be involved in big data, and you want to be involved in the community and all the things that are happening, you don’t necessarily have to have a technical role to be involved in that.
There’s three roles that I want to talk about that are non-technical from the aspect of coding and Hadoop administration that you can do to still be involved in data or even big data. I’m going to put them together. These aren’t just specifically for big data. This can be around data analytics.
The first one is around data governance. When we talk about data governance, we talk about, what’s the flow of data? Where did the data originate? Everybody’s probably heard of the adage or the example of garbage in, garbage out. Where’s your data coming from? Can you trust, and can you automate, and trust the data that’s coming in? Data governance is about where that data comes from, but it’s also about, how timely is that data? You’re really involved with the sourcing of the data. You’re also looking at things around… I remember one of my first career options. I remember sitting around, and we have a couple different applications, and the heads of each application were together, and we were all there to talk about the different ways that we name things in our own databases. If you think about it, we were trying to merge everything into an enterprise data warehouse. This is a little more old school, but it still happens in big data, when we have these different data sources.
You might have an instance where data from one data set is named or has a different key than data in a separate data set, but you want to be able to merge those. Data governance is around, you can help find and help be a part of that, where the data’s coming from, so that’s one option. I would look into data governance if you still wanted to be involved in big data but didn’t have the technical skills or didn’t have desire to have the technical skills.
Another one is project management. We always need good project managers. Project managers, they’re the ones, the workhorses that really help bring the developers, bring the data scientists, bring the front-end developers, bring everybody together, and really gets that project going. Makes sure that we’re communicating. If you’re interested in project management, you can do that from a non-technical perspective. One of the things, though. I’ve got some stuff on my website where I went through and did the scrum master training. Think of agile development. Just like you would in traditional application development, big data needs agile developers or agile project managers as well.
Then, also look at the scrum master training, but also look at DevOps, and see where that is, if there’s any DevOps certifications, or anything that you can provide in that background to be able to help and manage these teams. Project management is a second one, and then the big one, the next one, compliance and security. We always need compliance and we always need security, especially now with the maturity of the Hadoop community and how much Hadoop is taking over and being used in the enterprise. There’s always compliance around it. You think of HIPAA, you think of some of the SEC compliance here in America. Then, you can also think of GDPR. GDPR, General Data Protection Requirements compliance, I would look at that regulation.
That’s something that’s really interesting to me, and if I was somebody non-technical, and I was interested in compliance or security, that is one area I would start to look at, because I think there’s going to be a growing need. Anytime there’s any kind of regulation, and this is a political statement in any way, but anytime there’s any kind of regulation or change in regulation, there’s a lot of things that go on behind the scenes as far as interpreting that and making sure that you’re in compliance with your enterprise, or if you’re working for some kind of public institution, you want to make sure you’re doing that. Anytime something like that, if you can become an expert and move to that, that would be huge as well.
For securing the data, too. It’s an ongoing, probably overused joke. How many data breaches have you heard about? There’s one every day. Big data is not, we’re not, immune to that. In fact, we’re larger, a larger target. Think about the three Vs.
Volume. How much data do we have in your Data Lake? Big data has big data, right? You need to be able to secure that. Those are the three areas I would look at for non-technical jobs if you still want to be involved in data. Data governance, project management, and compliance and security. That’s all for today. Thanks for tuning in. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss an episode. I will see you again on Big Data Big Questions.