How to train existing employees on Big Data?

It’s very challenging to talk about Big Data without taking about the skills required for big data. At present companies are suffering from Big Data skill gap. According to a CompTIA survey of 500 U.S. business and IT executives, 50 percent of firms that are moving forward on the way to leverage big data, and 71 percent of firms that just started leveraging big data, feel that their staff are not so proficient in data management and analysis skills. Due to the lack of knowledge about big data processing, employees couldn’t give their full effort and it may cause for the project failure. So, the training of existing employees on Big Data should be an integrated part of big data processing.

Now, if you are a caretaker of a company you may have a question that “How”? How to train your employees on big data?

Let us try to find answer for these questions and to make your current team more big data ready.

• If you are a company having a base of developers in java, python or Ruby then you may further proceed towards their training on big data because these are some of the language useful for big data processing. So, overall you first need to train your employee on these languages i.e. java, python, ruby, etc.
• You also need to train them on database development side with NoSQL Big Data systems like HBASE, MongoDB, Cassandra etc. You may choose database developer with good SQL knowledge to train on database part.
• For the installation or setup big data lab you may need to train some people as Linux admin so that they make you big data lab ready for Hadoop or AWS. For this you may choose people with Linux knowledge.
• After all these theoretical training you may need to go for some practical work on big data processing. For this use Hortonworks or Cloudera services to give practical training to your employees.
• There are many free and paid online courses available for big data training. Can start with free course and can move to paid ones, if anything specific required. You may provide these materials to your employee where they will get online study material as well as practical works on big data processing.
• For the analyst work, first you need to find employees with good analytical and reasoning skills. Train them to use different big data analysing tools.

With the help of these ways you may train your existing employees on big data and make them ready to start. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that by 2018, there will be a shortage of 1.7 million workers with big data skills in the U.S. alone—140,000 to 190,000 workers with deep technical and analytical expertise and 1.5 million managers and analysts with the skills to work with big data outputs. It is a truth that big data processing and most of its components are new but you can easily cross train your employees on big data if you really want to get in this field. You just need to take existing developers, analyst and admins and cross train them.