My Learning Bucket List for 2021
The question about my learning plans has been at the back of my mind since I got it from Nil Peksen…but besides many thoughts I was struggling to formulate my answer clearly. I’ve been reading a lot about trends for 2021 and about predictions for the coming “roaring 20s”. Deep inside I felt this is what other authors wanted to influence me about.
The Aha! moment happened this week when I read a post Do less and do it better written by my teammate DJ Adams. The opening sentence “In 2021 I want to consolidate and improve upon some skills I already have, rather than add more.” was exactly what I was struggling to formulate for myself!
…consolidate and improve
upon skills I already have…
Ok. I am a data professional with strong development and architecture focus on data engineering, data analytics plus data science in the SAP technology space. That’s my core, which I am going to consolidate, improve and expand from there. So, here is my bucket list and, please, do not be surprised, if you use a lot of overlap (instead of reinventing) with the last year’s list.
Data-to-value with
SAP Business Technology Platform
Last week SAP CTO Juergen MUELLER said “[…] SAP announced RISE with SAP – our concierge service to the intelligent enterprise. Ultimately, the intelligent enterprise strategy is about integrating data and processes across all lines of business, and SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), as its technological foundation, plays a pivotal role in making this happen.” in his A Robust Platform for RISE with SAP.
One of the use cases for SAP BTP as the platform is to “create advanced insights and decide with confidence”. This, actually, does overlap with one of the trends predicted by industry analysts for 2021 — the Unified platform for Data and Analytics.
What does it mean for me? It means you should see more of my content focused on how SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, SAP Data Intelligence, and SAP AI come together when you develop a data-centric solution.
SAP and Open/Partner
But today’s world requires an open approach allowing products to work well with dynamically evolving Data and Analytics ecosystem. Think data federation with 3rd party sources in SAP HANA Cloud, or SAP AI leveraging open ML frameworks. So, I plan to pay attention to that.
Data Analytics
Last two years I mostly focused on data engineering and ML topics, so this year I want to catch up on my roots: Data Analytics. It means you should see some more content on SAP HANA modeling and SAP Analytics Cloud from me.
Data Visualization
Related to the one above I plan to extend my data visualization development outside of Python to leverage JavaScript and R too. That would equally apply to canned dashboarding for applications as well as freestyle exploratory data analysis (aka EDA).
SAP Certifications
You right have noticed that last year I focused mostly on external certifications. It helped me to realize that the last time I approached a certification exam from SAP was in … 2006.
So, I am adding certification exams in the area of data analytics with SAP to my bucket list for this year!
So, that’s my bucket and my sandbox for 2021. What are yours?
