A lot of entry-level professionals struggle to decode important skills required when starting a career path in SQL Server and other tech fields. Most people just focus on the immediate problems, neglecting what’s essential for professional development. You might think you are just a beginner right now and have ample time to learn. But that’s not completely true. If you swiftly want to move ahead in your career as a developer, DBA or BI professional, you need to dive in head first, follow what the experts have to say, in order to meet the requirements you’ll see ten years from now. This blog post is more about what key skills an SQL Server beginner must build during their first year in the industry.
Listen and Understand - Desired Outcome and Concerns
The first step to skill always starts with how good you are at observing, listening and understanding. With every new project or assignment, it is critical to carefully listen and understand the client’s requirements and the final outcome they need. Since, it is the senior level persons in the management who get to meet and decide how to pull it off. Being a newbie in the arena, always listen carefully or ask what they talked about and how they are going to translate those mutually-agreed requirements into a solution. This way, you get to gain a valuable insight into how and why a solution is proposed. Equally important is to understand about the associated concerns with the proposed solution as of now. The final solution must account for these concerns too.
Technical Curiosity
An important skill among those who reached heights in their technical career is a curiosity. Curiosity has a direct influence on the success—observe an unexpected/strange behavior, and dig in to find out why. Without technical curiosity, you won’t feel the urge to explore and understand, and probably also won’t spare time to reading blogs, spending time at home or office lab, or invent your own open-source script. Learn how to approach figuring out something you don’t know.
Well-rounded Personality
People (your seniors!) like to work with well-rounded individuals. Passionate, enthusiastic, smart – all these qualities make a junior level professional likeable. Employers and senior associates want passionate people who WANT to learn and take pride in what they do in office. The smart ones will find new ways to do things, taking lesser time, and enthusiastic juniors will not get bored if the work is something repetitive.
Don't Shy Away From Asking For Help
It’s always practical and intelligent to know that you need help. If you are stuck at a snippet of code, from last two weeks, but just feel that it would eventually work out. You are doing it wrong! You are a newbie at work and you are expected not to know things by yourself and certainly you don’t have enough time to find it on your own because the deadlines are already close. Don’t be shy. Seniors are happy to explain the complex concepts and provide help, and management is happy to see juniors who show eagerness to learn.
Be a Team Player
Understand that the project you are working on is more important that your belief that the feature or code you’re working on will make the cut. If your seniors want someone else to help you or to totally overtake the task, be a good sport. Keep your ego aside, when at work, and trust your seniors and teammates. Happily, take a back seat and keep contributing. Although, learning what made senior-level people take a decision to replace you is what you would want to ponder on for the future.
Research and Network
Never refrain from scanning fat books or browse the internet (there are a lot of helpful e-books and experts!) to learn how to solve a specific problem when you feel stuck. Network building is critical; it helps you connect to consult knowledgeable friends, peers and associates that can undoubtedly reduce an infuriating quest to fix an error before it is too late.
Good Communication
Communication is a key skill and can take you to the level you want to. If you can communicate complex things you do or need to do in a comprehensive, simple-to-understand manner so that a guy you met in the street today would understand – you are almost there! Your communication skills will definitely help you win over your seniors, and who knows, you might be their next choice to lead an individual project, in future.
Beginner Level Technical Skills
Well, the discussed skills are non-technical but soft skills and make you a ‘skillful’ employee as a whole. You will be able to move from one technology to the next with ease. These above 7 less-technical skills will accompany you all through your career. But that doesn’t mean tech skills are not important. They are the basis of how you will use these soft skills to your benefit. For all the technical requirements of SQL Server, you can choose Microsoft SQL Server training programs for beginners. These training courses by Microsoft and other recognized institutions can help beginners enhance performance and productivity and set themselves towards a strong career path.
Boost Your SQL Career with QuickStart
QuickStart is a well-known IT skills learning marketplace that provides valuable training programs to beginner level and experienced professionals for Microsoft SQL Server. The courses allow beginners to give a firm start to their career and enable experience ones to revisit the basics and explore new capabilities of SQL Server.
The Querying Microsoft SQL Server (MS-20461) course by QuickStart provides a solid understanding of the Transact-SQL language with all the technical skills required to write basic T-SQL queries for Microsoft SQL Server 2014. Preparing for this course, developers and administrators can give Writing Queries Using Microsoft® SQL Server® 2014 Transact-SQL (70-461) exam, which is the underlying exam for all SQL Server-related disciplines. This course covers new features in SQL Server 2014, but also the important capabilities across the SQL Server data platform.
This Microsoft SQL Server training is a virtual instructor-led course and is intended for database administrators, database developers, and business intelligence professionals. Non-database-focused professionals can also do this course to get educated about SQL Server basics.
QuickStart proudly boasts about its 200,000+ satisfied students and 100,000+ hours of in-depth, industry leading knowledge base. The students at QuickStart experience personalized learning under the supervision of professional instructors and SQL Server experts using a high impact instructional methodology. Your partnership with QuickStart can mark the difference between an ordinary career and a power-boosted career.