I graduated 3 years back with a BA in Economics and now work for a major airline in a basic job completely unrelated to anything. I see a lot of job postings in other cities for data analysts and recently I've received emails for new openings for similar positions in my city. Here are some qualifications and responsibilities that seem pretty universal across most job postings.

Utilize database tools to develop standardized processes that allow for easy interpretation of large volumes of data

Incorporate automation techniques to reduce waste run time and ensure accurate and timely delivery of daily, weekly and monthly operational performance reports

Integrate new solutions with our current processes to further automate data set pulls from multiple sources, to include business partner data sources

Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Excel; experience with charting, graphing and visualization tools required

Experience with SASS, SQL, Tableau, Hyperion and Brio


From the sticky it looks like online courses from Sanford/MIT would be a good place to start. There are a ton of classes offered so does anyone have any recommendations on classes they've taken in the past that would help someone with no experience? I've been out of college for 3 years so there's probably going to be a bigger learning curve with me compared to someone who has at least done something with their degree once graduating.

Any other advice or resources would be appreciated as well. Thanks!

Try the sql stuff on codecademy for a start

http://www.w3schools.com/sql/default.asp

Also, buy books (or online tutorials) on all those technologies and read through them.

The best place would be read the entire documentation on the SQL system you are working on.

I'd also advice getting SQL Antipatterns for general SQL patterns and knowledge.

Then find a book that is highly-rated on Amazon that focuses on your particular RDMS.

Creating and optimizing queries is simple. The hard part is everything else.

Prof at uni had a cool database of all the nations on earth that had population, density, average income, whatever.

If you could find a database online like that, after setting up sql and import it. Then learning how to pull multiple results based on a type of question you ask yourself, would be better for learning.

w3schools has pretty good stuff for starting out with the basics like jackson suggested.

if you need datasets, there is a good little newsletter with tons of stuff:

http://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural

Thanks guys. Some good suggestions here.

You can get Tableau public for free. Well worth the effort to get a handle on making dashboards.

I can say from my experience:

Understand tuple
Converting datatypes
Working with multiple tables
Grouping, Ordering
Subquery - get good at these - core concept in creating anything complex
Joins - Eq and Outer - another absolute requirement to know cold
Logic against sysdate to get away from hard coding a date range, etc
Case Statements
Toad Automation Scripts
Calling Data from multiple environments
Using Powershell - create staging files for automation scripts

To be honest OP, I write SQL everyday for work. I feel that in 2-4 weeks I could get someone rather proficient at the fundamentals (enough to do a decent job and pathway for learning) granted you would have to have the right mindset. I could barter training... Granted I work primarily in an Oracle environment and SQL Server definitely has some distinct nuances, but it definitely adds a lot of career value being able to ETL data around so the legwork for your visual tools like tableau are easier and more impactful.