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I want to thank Jim Donahue and the Rising Tides Analytics team for hosting a great networking event! Two big takeaways for me: Every person that I spoke with had a different data technology "fingerprint.” Their experience, tools, preferences, methods were all unique. This may go without saying, but it reminded me that there is rarely ever one right solution. With all the permutations of capabilities, it stands to reason that finding the right resource for your data needs is much like finding a needle in a haystack. With a growing team of experienced Associates, the goal of the Data Help Desk is to bring as many of these fingerprints together to maximize our ability to deliver the most value to you. It’s a tough market out there. Supply for our services seems abundant, whether you’re a big shop, small shop, in between roles - there is no shortage of those open to work or looking for work. Despite the phones not ringing off the hook, so to speak, I believe the work is still there. Companies haven’t stopped using data (quite the opposite, actually). They’ve just deprioritized the big investment for the time being, or found new and creative ways to tap into other resources. A few observations of our current landscape... - Especially for the newbies, the tech stack is more than just a language or viz tool. You’ll need to solve for ingestion, transformation, orchestration, modeling, visualization, analysis… Key in on the established players and emergent movements (not fads) and become familiar with a breadth of solutions, be they Azure, AWS, Fabric, Power BI, Tableau, Snowflake, SQL, Python, Databricks, Alteryx, etc. - Generative AI has become our new Jr. Developer. Companies have begun to figure this out. Newbies, use this to your advantage. Tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. can immensely speed up the learning curve. Even as an experienced technologist, I have begun to leverage them regularly. In many cases, they’ll get you 80% of the way there at a fraction of the time or cost. - Agentic AI coupled with its generative capabilities is on the forefront of routinized task automation. While I am as new to this as many of you, even just a peek into what the likes of Copilot can do is energizing. You’re giving the AI tool authority to perform tasks based on the information you feed it. As data technologists, our roles are ever more important. Data and information connectivity will be the price of admission. Having context of those sources and curating them effectively (the way that our brains can do in ways not easily codified) will be the path to success for new and experienced professionals alike. All this to say that there is still much work to be done, and whether it be resources like Rising Tides Analytics or the Data Help Desk, or authorities like Dustin Schimek who open up a world of opportunities to their followers, a trusted network of partners and advisors is paramount to navigating this journey with the quickest path to value.