As my current contract gets a last breath of life and I begin to search for opportunities, this one question has really been doing rounds in my mind. Let me further elaborate on that question before people jump the gun. Does experience in particular technology really matter, if you already have knowledge in related subject matter?

For over a decade since starting my career, I had worked with MSBI suite of technologies with PowerShell, C# thrown in. It wasn’t until I came here to Sydney to work for a different client (LINK Group) where I had the opportunity of working with different sets of tools such as Informatica and Oracle. Things were going good.

As the work came through, I adapted myself to learning the new tools and working with them. It didn’t take time to really upskill. It was then I got a lucky break. Vinay Sammineni of Cognitivo Consulting and his partner Alan Hsiao took upon my CV (from a mutual friend) and saw that I had very good data warehousing and SQL skills.

They phoned me and asked me if I was interested to work for Amaysim who were looking for a data analyst with the skills required being – Alteryx, Tableau, Amazon Redshift and stated further that they have also set-up an interview with them. This was quite a shock and I clearly remember asking them multiple times if they have gone through my CV as I didn’t have any experience in any of them up till that point.

The interview with Jacquie went well and the questions were mostly focused on standard SQL and my past work experience – the challenges that I had faced, dealing with demanding managers etc. She then went on about the tools the company were using and she was quite blasé about me not knowing them and said you shouldn’t find any difficulty getting acclimatised with them.

That was how my new path began to take shape. I honestly can’t thank enough the folks at Amaysim and also Vinay and Alan for believing in me and my abilities to transition my existing knowledge and using it to develop new ones.

As I start applying for jobs for Data Engineering roles, I hope I come across a company who can see my capability to transition my existing breadth of knowledge and not exactly on the tech skills that I work with.