Tips For Hiring Junior Data Engineers

For Companies And Junior Data Engineers

With all the recent data events I have put together I inevitably run into new data engineers who are either finishing up college or looking to transition into a data engineer or data scientist position.

In fact I have talked to several newly graduated engineers who are struggling to find work. A few told me how the previous classes from their program were able to find a new job in a few months and now they are far past those few months.

Oddly enough at the same time I have a client that has asked me what they should look for in junior data engineers.

So let’s mash two potatoes with one fork.

In this article I wanted to give some advice to hiring managers looking to hire junior data engineers as well as give advice to new college grads and career switchers in terms of getting their first data engineering role.

Hiring For Juniors

Hiring junior data engineers is tricky. Many data engineering topics aren’t taught in school. So if you ask a newly minted computer science or information systems major to design a data model, they’d likely not know what you were asking for.

So how do you interview junior engineers?

There are several areas that junior engineers should be comfortable with. Those areas in my mind are:

• Programming

• SQL

• Data Modeling ( to a point)

• Desire To Learn