I was delighted to host a panel at Data Talent Scotland earlier this month. It was exciting to be back at a face-to-face event, mixing with some of the biggest employers in the data industry as well as meeting and chatting with the next generation of data talent.
Data Talent Scotland is all about gathering like-minded people in the same room who are passionate about data, and watching innovation happen. It provides invaluable real-world interactions for both experienced data professionals, entry level talent, and organisations.
My specialist area is within Data Engineering recruitment; it is such a vibrant market with incredible opportunities, but due to the exponential growth in the profession, supply hasn’t been meeting demand. For a few years now, I have been creating conversations in the world of Data Engineering to address the lack of talent across the Scottish landscape. These conversations have led to meetings and events which have been part of a larger plan - to create Scotland’s first committed data engineering community. This is being formed to help bolster the skills shortage and increase the number of opportunities for data engineers at grassroots level.
Building this community led to us being invited to present a workshop at Data Talent Scotland, presenting “The Rise of Data Engineering – Could this be for me?”.
We invited some industry experts to help lead the discussion:
Louise Ritchie – Data Engineer at NatWest
Scott Dickie - Data Engineer at Skills Development Scotland
Calum Mather – General Manager at INOV8 Consulting
Stuart Anderson – University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics & Director & SICSA
Together, we discussed the origin and future of Data Engineering. We looked at some interesting market trends and examined statistics, before opening up the conversation to the audience and receiving some thought provoking questions.
The workshop was well received with fantastic feedback from the audience and plenty of buy-in to our community idea, which encourages us to keep the momentum going and develop this idea further for the benefit of the Scottish Data Space.
From here, we’ll look to grow dataengineering.scot on LinkedIn, we’ll organise more events in 2022 and continue this work to bring together data engineers.
