How to diversify your skills for a better DataStage Career

There are ways to make yourself a better DataStage developer that are outside of DataStage. There are some skills and fields and products that go hand in hand with DataStage or any other ETL tool.

This post is about how to boost your path to an IT career by learning complementary skills on top of your DataStage skills. Since DataStage is a very hard product to get a hold of for evaluation and personal training it can be easier to beef up your competencies in other downloadable tools like Oracle and Linux.

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Companion Skills

It’s hard to get by on just knowing DataStage. It is possible but it’s better if you have some other skills such as database, operating system scripts or enterprise products. This graph takes some stats from a site called ITJobsWatch that shows the most popular keywords that appear in online job listings that also mention DataStage. It gives some indicating of what employers are looking for alongside DataStage skills.

I’ve taken the stats from the DataStage page and put them into IBM Many Eyes:

What this graph shows is that some employers are looking for.

Database skills: Oracle are massively ahead of DB2 and SQL Server and a distant Sybase. If you are learning DataStage you should also learn Oracle or use the free Oracle download for your personal training as these two skills pair up very well.
Operating System skills: Unix first, followed by AIX and Solaris. Surprisingly Linux does not rate though I am seeing an increasing use of DataStage on Linux these days. Operating System scripting skills are great for writing scripts that can be run from DataStage Sequence jobs or that can run and report on the status of DataStage jobs from an enterprise scheduling tool. Learning Linux is a good free substitute for the Unix systems.
Field: the ETL skill is obvious and if you have Oracle and an ETL tool skill you could jump to DataStage. Other popular fields are data migration and data warehousing. The Data Warehouse is interesting, when I look at the same results for Informatica Data Warehousing comes in as the third keyword behind Oracle and ETL. My experience with evaluations is that Informatica has done well in DW projects but DataStage has done better at other migration and integration projects.
Skill: the best generic cross product skill for the ETL developer is SQL. A good ETL developer as you are constantly writing SQL for verifying load results and configuring user-defined SQL for database stages. PL/SQL appears on this list and there may be projects out there that are converting from a PL/SQL approach across to DataStage or using PL/SQL as a set of steps that occur before or after a DataStage load.
Low down on the list are products like SAS and Business Objects and SAP. They may be low on the list but the combination of the two is a sub niche that might give you a good salary.
Language: Dutch and French appeared in a lot of advertisements. These two countries are close to the UK and have some large DataStage sites.

So the popular keywords show us that if you want to make yourself more valuable you should look at Oracle and Unix skills and demonstrate some interest in either data migration or data warehousing. If you are in finance or banking there are a plenty of opportunities to get into data warehousing work.

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Selling your Skills

Don’t walk into a DataStage interview expecting to just talk about DataStage. Take the opportunity to branch into databases and operating systems when answering questions.

Eg. Instead of saying you’ve used Sequence jobs to control DataStage jobs mention you have used Sequence jobs and Unix scripts that run file archive commands and send alert emails. Talk about how you have used database stages with complex user-defined SQL, or how you understand SQL well enough to examine the results of DataStage loads for data quality issues.

Be Interested in Data Integration

When getting into a DataStage career or going for a DataStage role it helps to be interested in data integration and demonstrate an interest in either data migration or data warehousing or both. If I’m interviewing a DataStage candidate I don’t care if they have never touched a data warehouse as long as they have moved or integrated data and appreciate the challenges. It helps if they can talk about some data quality issues or the staging of data or how tough lookups can be.

You need to bring out your inner geek.

Using DataStage will get you the required developer skills but continually reading up on data warehouse and data migration issues such as data quality and surrogate keys and slowly changing dimensions makes you look like a well rounded developer.