27 year old experienced database dev looking for advice

Career Advice
1

Hi all,

I’ve been working in the industry for 5+ years now, as a database dev. I’ve been using SQL for my day-to-day tasks and nothing much besides it. I’m paid decent salary for this work but am not learning / growing in skills besides SQL.

Question is, what can I do to branch out to other roles?

Thank you for your time

2

Professionally? You’d have to discuss that with your employer and see how they are willing to accommodate. Are there devs there doing jobs you like? Can you talk to them?

Personally, you can invest time in learning. What do you want to do? Frontend? With such strong SQL skills, that might fit well with backend work? What is the backend at work? Why not start learning that?

3

Knowing how to use SQL effectively gives you a strong career boost. So does your real-world understanding of your company’s data. As you know, it takes years to get that experience. Honestly it’s tough to get real-world-data experience in school. You have it!

If you’re interested in branching out into development, you have a few paths open to you.

  1. Find out what development environment / stack your company uses and focus on learning that. (It’s always a good idea to know that even if you don’t work in it.)

  2. Dream up a simple utility program to do something your company needs done. There are usually dozens of opportunities like that. “Generate a daily framis report.” You get the idea. Ask your manager for permission to spend some time working on it. Ask a developer co-worker to help you set up and develop it.

  3. Follow FCC’s curriculum. It won’t use your SQL skills directly, but you’ll learn how to put together a nice web app.

  4. Find a curriculum similar to FCC’s that uses SQL for data handling.

Here’s something to keep in mind: the various makes and model of SQL-based databases often come from vendors who provide the rest of the stack. They often have their own getting-started curricula. For example.

  • Microsoft / SQL Server / C# / dot Net
  • Oracle / Java

But you can also mix it up, using open-source components.

4

Thank you for taking the time to answer this, I don’t have a specific ideas as to what I want to do. Just something with data (as I come from SQL background).

5

Thanks a lot for replying, I’ll have to delve deeper into the things you listed. I’m on FCC to learn different skills (like python).