Big Data Academy first insights

Rapid development and growing demand in the market for Big Data technologies has created new job opportunities. Kainos addressed this by launching a brand-new initiative our Big Data Academy. Nine people; six weeks; the essential Big Data technology stack, for our people to develop new skills in distributed programming, stream computing and many more exciting areas. In this new Big Data blog series, we'll try to take a closer look at who the attendees are, what they're doing during the academy, what have they learned and many more. We asked some of attendees to share their observations about the academy as part one!

Marcin Czajka, Data Capability Lead

"This is the first edition of Kainos Big Data Academy, and it was a pretty big challenge to set things up to ensure efficient use of time. After four weeks, we had covered whole Cloudera certification content and now we are focusing on implementing real life solutions around traffic data in Gdansk. It's great to be a part of this journey and see how people (including myself) quickly learned. It's unique for any company to provide two months training for new starters - it is a huge investment in our employees. Everyone who wants to develop their data skills should actively look for our future Academies!'

Jakub Raczka, Data Engineer

"Nowadays the term 'big data' has become very popular. Many important scientific conclusions are based on studying huge datasets and asking proper questions. Kainos Big Data Academy has given us the opportunity to get familiar with tools and techniques used in the industry. During our labs, we learned lots of new topics and were able to implement them in practice. Initially, big data seemed to be a very big and difficult topic but after some time and practice most things quickly fell into place. I would recommend the Big Data Academy to anyone curious about the subject it is a lot easier when you have passionate people around you and can share thoughts and ideas with them.'

Jakub Flis, Data Engineer

When I joined the academy, I didn't really know what to expect. I'd heard that Big Data is a really trending technology buzzword right now, and I'd had some labs around this topic at university so I had a basic grasp. When the academy started, I was surprised how many impactful and interesting problems this industry is trying to solve. I immediately realized that joining the academy was definitely a good opportunity, and I can't wait to face further challenges.'

Krzysztof Krawczyk, Trainee Data Engineer

"Big Data is a difficult topic, especially if you are trying to learn it alone. The number of technologies can give you a headache! Our academy is a perfect place for all newbies in this area. Kainos provided a great learning path which helps you to know it in an easy way. I think the best part of our classes is that every person has different technical background, so you can improve a lot of your skills and share your knowledge with a team. I am glad to be a part of it.'

Mariusz Rudzis, Trainee Data Engineer

"In my opinion the Big Data Academy makes great opportunity for those people who have never been working with Big Data and want to start to do it. I'm one of these people, and at this moment I can say I don't regret making the move into Big Data. It is considered a very complicated topic, but since the Academy, the pace of learning has helped things become quickly very clear. Currently we are learning about a variety of different tools that are used in BD projects, for instance: Sqoop. Hive, Impala, Apache Kafka and Spark.' Want to find out more about careers in Data? Check out our open vacancies here.