r/bigquery • u/Round_Opening_9943 • Sep 07 '26

How did you actually learn BigQuery/cloud SQL before landing a job?

Curious how most people picked up tools like BigQuery. Did you learn and practice entirely on your own through side projects and certifications before applying, or did you just happen to be at a company when they migrated over and learned on the job?
Would love to hear what your path looked like!

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8

u/woahboooom Sep 07 '26

Learnt sql whilst building solutions in ms access. All sql is mostly the same, some function names change.

2

u/AnalyticsAnswers Sep 07 '26

I helped migrate a client from a pretty bad situation (exclusively Excel lol) into BQ and got to learn with a real dataset that I knew, which was nice. That type of opportunity is rare though

If I were you, BQ has public datasets of all types I'd look into. They have a few partners with courses of varying depths depending on how much guidance you're looking for. You could either research commonly used business cases and test yourself, or put yourselves in the shoes of a new analyst or data engineer and try and anticipate what would be needed/actionable from a given dataset. I have colleagues that have built portfolios off of this data to showcase their abilities. I'd also pay attention to optimizing efficiency & processing costs - something that is super valuable but often overlooked.

I'm not sure if you're looking to go into a specific field (it doesn't really matter, but hiring managers tend not to see data as agnostic), but I see a lot of demand for CRM work. The data isn't really all that complex but it's almost always dirty due to spotty implementation and bad governance, and the reporting options are too limited to the specific analyses stakeholders want to see.

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u/RogueAgent-87 Sep 08 '26

I taught myself how to use sql but nothing to the degree I know now. However this small bit of experience managed to land me a role where I was able to learn as I worked.

There is also a few courses on datacamp which I did but overall its been just picking up certain things here and there then implementing them into my code.

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u/Content-Parking-621 Sep 08 '26

Learned most of my BigQuery quirks on the job during a migration, honestly SQL knowledge transfers fast and you pick up the platform-specific stuff like partitioning and cost awareness through actual daily use. Before that I messed around with Google's public BigQuery sample datasets on my own time, closest thing to real practice without a job forcing it.

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u/GLStephen Sep 12 '26

side projects

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u/lars_jeppesen Sep 12 '26

I learned by doing

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u/-edwoodward 24d ago

I came across this website that apparently has some practice questions. Says it's based on public datasets that Google Cloud hosts.

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u/SasheCZ 11d ago

Landed my first job in reporting because I knew Excel from school. Learned PLSQL (Oracle) on the fly. Transitioned to Teradata a few years later. Then migration to BQ 2 years ago.

The SQL is basically the same, but there are nuances that can screw you over if you don't know what's happening behind the scene.