If you’re hoping to start a career in Business Intelligence or Data Analysis, you’ll need to study, practice and hone your skills. Not only to build your project portfolio but also to be ready and prepared for any technical questions that job interviews may throw at you.

In this article, I’m going to talk about 5 awesome learning resources that you can use to practise and upskill to help you land your first job and kick-start your career.

Stratascratch

The first resource is a website I found out about fairly recently. It’s called Stratascratch.

It describes itself as “a data science platform with over 1,000+ real interview questions from your favourite companies”. Companies like Facebook, Google, Airbnb, Microsoft and Stripe.

They have 3 paid plans that ultimately I’d suggest you sign up for but, if you’re on a budget, you can just sign up for a free account.

With a free account, you get access to 50 free coding questions for SQL and Python with solutions so you can check your answers. And over 500 questions without solutions that you can use for practice and to get an idea of all of the kinds of interview questions you might come up against.

The coding questions are all categorised by company, difficulty and question type and you can apply various filters based on your level and interest.

On each question page, you can see the columns in the dataset and preview the data itself. You can even see what the expected output is and approach hints if you need a little help.

In order to solve the question you write your SQL or Python directly in the editor on the question page.

For me, it’s a fantastic resource that helps you level up your SQL and Python game to get that job you’re after!

LearnSQL.com

So if you’re not yet ready for Stratascratch and you need to start learning SQL from scratch - or simply brush up on your existing knowledge - you have LearnSQL.com. It’s a website offering a comprehensive set of 59 hands-on, online SQL courses for teams and individuals.

You get Lifetime access to a single SQL course for just $29 but you can start with a free plan to test out the interface and, here’s the good part, if you are a student, you can get completely free access to their full SQL Basics course which is a set of 129 interactive exercises. So that’s really great for anyone wanting to get started with SQL.

Like with Stratascratch, you write the SQL queries and complete the exercises directly on the website with nothing to download.

The courses are really easy to follow and are for all different levels from beginner to advanced in 4 different SQL dialects. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Coursera

Coursera is a fantastic, well-established and well-respected learning organisation. It offers loads of different learning programmes and professional certificates from companies like Google, Meta and IBM, to help you choose a new career path.

But being the Learn BI channel, the one programme I’d like to draw your attention to, if you’re serious about preparing for a new career as a BI or Data Analyst, is the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate.

Over 8 courses, you learn lots of in-demand skills that you’ll need to get an entry-level data analyst job. And, unlike courses you might find on other learning platforms like Udemy, they are taught by Google employees.

After completing the certificate, you can share it on your CV or Linkedin and it will carry a lot of weight with potential employers and help you get an entry-level job.

So what will you learn and how long will it take?

To answer the first question, you’ll learn key analytical skills and tools to give you an immersive understanding of the practices and processes used by junior or associate data analysts in their day-to-day job.

So, things like data cleaning and analysis using spreadsheets, SQL and R programming and data visualisation, presentation and dashboards using Tableau, an industry-standard BI tool.

And how long will it take? What’s great is that the programme requires no prior experience and is completely self-paced. If you’re a total beginner, at under 10 hours a week, you can complete the certificate in less than 6 months. But, honestly, if you’ve already got some experience working with Excel, SQL and BI tools, it will be shorter than that.

To check the programme and its curriculum out, just click here to enrol for a free 7-day trial. After that, a subscription is just $39/36€  a month which is an absolute bargain considering the quality of the programme and the impact it could have on you finding a well-paying job upon completion.

Also, don’t forget to check out all the free courses available. Thanks, Coursera! 

Kaggle

Next is a fantastic website that you may already be familiar with, Kaggle.com. So, Kaggle is an online community platform for data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts but don’t let that put you off.

For BI and data analysts, it’s a place where you can find and download loads of interesting datasets that you can use for practising data analysis and visualisation. And that you could potentially use for a portfolio project.

Just go to datasets from the menu, then search by keyword or choose a category. I chose data visualisation and hit the first result, “Most subscribed 1000 youtube channels”, we get a description of the data, we can see what columns we’ve got to work with and then we can download the dataset to our computer.

To practice with the datasets and build dashboards, you can load them to Looker Studio - Google’s free-to-use BI tool.

BigQuery

Finally, if you want to practice with large datasets, you can get acquainted with Google’s BigQuery, part of the Google Cloud Platform.

Just click here and you’ll be taken to a page where you’ll be guided through the setup process so you can start using what’s called the BigQuery Sandbox. It gives you 10 GB of active storage and 1 TB of processed query data per month for free. So not bad at all for practising with.

Once you’re in the sandbox and you’ve created a project, you just go to Add Data and public datasets. From there you’ll find over 200 free-to-use large datasets. I’m talking millions of rows.

You can either practice your SQL and query the data directly in BigQuery or, again, you could use Looker Studio, create a BigQuery data source and access the data from there so you can analyse and build dashboards with it.

What have I left out?

So what other resources have I missed that you think should be included on this list? Please do let me know in the comments as I’m always on the lookout for new and interesting ways to learn new skills. Or perhaps you already have experience with the resources I mentioned in this video? If so, let us know your thoughts.

One other resource - or at least tool - that isn’t on the list but that I did mention a couple of times in the video is Looker Studio. If you’re wanting to get started in Business Intelligence, for me it’s the best BI tool out there for beginners. And it’s completely free. For a quick 15-minute getting started tutorial, just click here.