Someone asked this on quora, and here’s my reply:
In the data world there are two broad sets of jobs available:
- Engineering-oriented: Date engineers, Data Warehousing specialists, Big Data engineer, Business Intelligence engineer— all of these roles are focused on building that data pipeline using code/tools to get the data in some centralized location
- Business-oriented: Data Analyst, Data scientist — all of these roles involve using data (from those centralized sources) and helping business leaders make better decisions. *
*smaller companies (or startups) tend to have roles where small teams(or just one person) do it all so the distinction is not that apparent.
So, it seems like you are interested in engineering-oriented roles — the role that focused on building data pipelines. Since you are starting out, I would suggest that you broaden the scope to learn about other tools as well. While data warehousing is still relevant and will be in some form or another for next few years, Industry (especially tech companies) have been slowly moving towards Big Data technologies and you need to be able to adapt to these changes. So learn about data warehousing, may be get a job/internship as a ETL/BI engineer but keep an eye out on other data engineering related tools like Hadoop ecosystem, spark, python, etc.