Here is a blog post that is not about COVID- 19.
Aug. 1, 2018 Data engineer: Today I found this article by Jared Lindzon in the Globe and Mail:
Aug. 1, 2018 Data engineer: Today I found this article by Jared Lindzon in the Globe and Mail:
Job: Data engineer
The role: To take advantage of new technologies such as machine learning, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence, organizations must first sort and organize data that are often stored on multiple, incompatible platforms. The role of a data engineer is to make data from different sources available for data scientists to utilize.
“You have all this disparate data that’s not mutually compatible with each other, and it’s very hard for a data scientist to work with,” explained Colin Fraser, a data scientist for Vancouver-based online charitable giving platform CHIMP. “A data engineer is someone who is fluent with all of those database types and languages, and can access the data out of all of them and integrate it into something that is usable for a data scientist.”
Mr. Fraser explains that companies often mistakenly hire data scientists to build new capabilities using the data they’ve gathered, only to discover that they first need to organize that data into a usable format, something most data scientists aren’t trained to do.
“Companies will jump to hiring a data scientist before they have a data engineer, and then the data scientist ends up sitting around for four, five, six months not really doing anything, because they're not skilled in data engineering,” he said.
Salary: According to online career resource Neuvoo.ca, the average data-engineer salary in Canada is about $100,000, while PayScale found the average salary to be a little over $81,500 annually.
“I would think in an entry-level position in data engineering, you would be looking at about $50,000 to $60,000 per year, and then mid-level would be $60,000 to $80,000 [annually] and upper would be $80,000 to over $100,000 [per year],” said Mr. Fraser, adding that the more platforms data scientists have proficiency in, the more they stand to earn.
Education: While there are no educational or licensing requirements, a vast majority of data engineers have at least an undergraduate-level degree in computer science, engineering, statistics or a related field.
The most important educational requirement for many employers, however, is certification or proven proficiency with popular database platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
“If you’re someone that already knows three or four systems, you’re a lot more valuable than someone who has to learn it on the job,” Mr. Fraser said.
Those seeking certification can find training programs and exam preparation materials through the major database platforms, including Microsoft Certified Professional certification, Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer and Amazon Web Services Certified Big Data Specialty. Exams are offered in major cities across Canada multiple times each year, and typically cost between $200 and $500 to write.
Job prospects: The demand for data scientists in Canada is skyrocketing, and organizations are gradually realizing the need for pairing them with data engineers. As a result, demand is growing, but not at the same rate as the more commonly understood data-scientist role.
“You might not find as many postings, but I think the need is just about the same,” Mr. Fraser said. “Big financial firms, banks, insurance companies, companies that have a long history of knowing that they need to protect and cherish their data will have bigger data-engineering teams, but it’s something that’s becoming more and more apparent and important for smaller companies, as well.”
Mr. Fraser adds that most employers are based in major cities, but data engineers are typically able to work remotely.
Challenges: Mr. Fraser says the biggest challenge most data engineers contend with is simply keeping up with the technology in a quickly evolving field.
“The way that you manage data today is very different even from how it was three years ago,” he said. “That means that whatever you learned in school five years ago is not used any more, so you constantly have to read about new technologies, try new technologies, go to conferences and see what other companies are doing.”
Why they do it: While keeping on top of advances in technology is the greatest challenge, Mr. Fraser says that, for many, it’s also the greatest perk.
“You’re really an architect when you’re a data engineer, in the sense that you’re building some kind of system with lots of moving parts that all have to talk to each other,” he said. “For the right personality, that’s a really exciting challenge.”
Misconceptions: The biggest misconception about data engineers, according to Mr. Fraser, is that companies don’t need to hire one if they already have a data scientist on staff. “The reality is that your data is probably very messy, your data is in lots of different places, and it takes a specialized, dedicated role to really process it and get it into a state where the data scientist can work with it,” he said.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/career-advice/article-i-want-to-be-a-data-engineer-what-will-my-salary-be/
Apr. 19, 2019 "Colleges and universities drop barriers for students seeking best of both worlds": Today I found this Jennifer Lewington in the Globe and Mail:
Apr. 19, 2019 "Colleges and universities drop barriers for students seeking best of both worlds": Today I found this Jennifer Lewington in the Globe and Mail:
When dental hygienist Katie McLellan decided to switch careers in 2016, she signed up for an undergraduate business degree at Algoma University in her hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.
Earlier, she had earned a liberal arts diploma from Sault College of Applied Arts and Technology – the other postsecondary institution in town – and counted some of her past courses toward her current university studies.
Ms. McLellan, 29, who enters her final year at Algoma this fall, says her education experience to date blends the best aspects of college (applied learning) and university (theory and thinking skills).
“It allows you to have your cake and eat it, too,” she says. “Why wouldn’t you?”
That’s also the question asked by a growing number of postsecondary institutions that now look to smooth pathways for students who migrate between college and university to earn their credentials.
For example, under new agreements signed this year, Algoma and two regional colleges in Ontario, Sault and Timmins-based Northern College, are able to maximize course credit recognition at the respective institutions instead of leaving students to navigate their own path to a diploma or degree. Starting in May, qualified graduates of selected two-year college diploma programs, including business, can transfer to study at Algoma for two years and earn a university degree.
“The more barriers you put up for students, the less likely you are to attract them to your programs to be able to help them succeed,” says Donna Rogers, academic dean at Algoma. “We are trying to remove barriers.”
With the new agreements, she adds, “a student starting in Sault or Northern will know from the very beginning this is an option for them.” As a result, students could shorten the time to earn a diploma or degree because they don’t have to repeat previous course content.
Dr. Rogers says that Algoma is “in preliminary conversations” to extend similar pathway agreements to other northern Ontario colleges, which deliver the same business curriculum as Sault and Northern.
Agreements like those between Algoma and its college counterparts are on the rise, says Denise Amyot, president and chief executive officer of Colleges and Institutes Canada. In 2014, her organization and Universities Canada, the national organization for universities across the country, signed a “framework” agreement to promote student mobility among postsecondary institutions.
Historically, students in some provinces, especially Ontario, faced barriers to recognition of past course credits when transferring between colleges and universities. The new reality of postsecondary education, notes Ms. Amyot, is that 47 per cent of those enrolled in colleges and institutes have attended some postsecondary institution and 34 per cent of enrolled students already have a degree or diploma.
To skeptics of college-university pathway agreements, Ms. Amyot asks: “’Are you doing the best for those students?’ At the end of the day we need to think about the students.”
One institution eager to work with its college counterparts is Niagara University, a private Catholic university in Lewiston, N.Y., on the Canada-United States border.
In an agreement announced last February by Niagara and Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ont., qualified graduates of two business programs will be eligible to apply for an MBA at the U.S. university this fall.
“There was an opportunity for advanced standing for our students so they would receive recognition for courses they had completed at Conestoga,” says Jeff Fila, director of academic initiatives and special projects at the college. As well, the two institutions are about a 90-minute drive from each other, presenting a “relatively nearby option” for Conestoga students, according to Mr. Fila.
Niagara, which has offered graduate teacher education in Ontario for decades under ministerial consent of the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, recently announced a permanent site to deliver these programs at the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre in suburban Toronto.
“We very much value the quality of programs in Ontario at the universities and the colleges,” says Vince Rinaldo, director of Ontario administration/academic affairs at Niagara. “With Conestoga students, on completion of their [four-year Conestoga] degree they can move right into the [Niagara] MBA and they will already have met the prerequisite requirements.”
According to the Ontario government’s Post-secondary Education Quality Assessment Board, the university is seeking ministerial consent to deliver an MBA, a master of science in finance and a master of science in information security and digital forensics in Vaughan. If the ministerial consents are approved, students could take business classes in Vaughan without travelling to Niagara’s Lewiston campus.
Dr. Rinaldo says his university’s proximity to the Canadian border remains an asset given the appetite for global trade. “People who are looking into business and saying I would like to get into international business ... don’t necessarily have to go to Europe or Asia,” he says. “The U.S. is international.”
Creating global learning opportunities was one reason why Manitoba’s Red River College and India’s Chitkara University agreed last January to promote overseas studies at their respective institutions. By 2021, Indian students could come to Red River for a two-year business information technology diploma while college students could head to India to complete a university degree.
“India is a huge and emerging market and from a postsecondary perspective there are a lot of similarities between Canadian and Indian institutions,” says Christine Watson, vice-president of academic at Red River. “We find there is a lot of neat alignment in approaches to applied learning in India; with Chitkara in particular [it is] one of the great opportunities for us to look at those connections with industry.”
Closer to home, the Manitoba college has an established relationship with the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business that allows qualified Red River graduates with two years of business studies to transfer into third-year undergraduate classes at Asper.
Asper recently added to the number of designated seats for Red River graduates, says Dr. Watson, in part because they enter the university with two years of college-level business studies. “It does give them a significant head start in understanding the business world and they already are absolutely immersed in the applied nature of that world,” she says.
Pathway agreements can also assist college-educated working professionals whose employers want them to return to school to upgrade knowledge and skills, she notes, with relevant past academic credentials counting toward future degrees or diplomas.
Meanwhile, Algoma student Ms. McLellan, set to graduate next year, says the combination of college and university studies helped her identify the career of her choice, likely one with a human resources focus in business.
“The skills you can put together from both institutions [college and university] are invaluable,” she says. “I really think it is the best route to take and you will get the most out of it.”
app_64476722 is correct in regard to the current BC situation. It should, however, be noted that the transfer policy was provoked by a protest involving more than 100 students who "occupied " the university library to express their concerns and mistreatment resulting from the lack of a credit transfer agreement among BC universities (the college system was still to be developed at that time so transfer problems involved lack of agreements among the 3 universities.)
The student protesters were taken from the library and arrested by the RCMP. However, their action resulted in the development of a comprehensive report and an eventual transfer agreement.
About time! More of this should be taking place. The US post secondary system has for decades allowed their college students to transfer directly into 3rd year at university without issue. This is a huge cost savings for the student.Canada/Ontario needs to get on the stick and approve more of these partnerships.
British Columbia institutions have offered this combination for years! Check out Royal Roads University, Thompson River University, Capilano University, Kwantlen, Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island. Such a great idea to meld post secondary learning.
Indeed! I think Quebec has something similar to B.C., with its CEGEP system. Unfortunately, universities have three principles holding back progress: "We've always done it this way!", "Everybody else does it this way!", and, the kicker, "It would cost too much to change the computer programmes!" Hence the lack of simple credit transfers... "But our standards are higher!" and, "Our courses cover different material!"
BC Does have transfer arrangements as you describe them. It should be noted however that it took a student strike, in the form of an occupation of the university library at SFU to provoke policy actions. (In the protest approximately 100 of the students were arrested by the RCMP.) Those were the days of SFU as the "radical university"!
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