DAXDude Advice to anyone just starting out

I was asked recently about how I found my passion career and how someone else can find theirs. There isnt one specific way but this is my formal advice: 

From a getting started perspective, you just have to find what makes you passionate and pursue. Cheesy yes, but you'll find the material you consume casually that is directly job related is easier to consume and helps round you out a lot. 

That said, I would recommend getting to be a 'generalist' in concepts and as fast as possible, then find your niche and make a home. that isn't just technology but also verticals, geographies, industries, etc. I've spent a career mentoring and training people and the ones that have been most successful are ones that focus on industries they know, and then find the solutions and technologies used to get in there. You'll know more via first hand experience than someone with an MBA going into that space. Then once you tie that industry to solutions, it'll click for you. 

As an example, I found more success working in industries I was passionate about like beverage industries (craft breweries/distilleries/wineries), music (Rodgers+Hammerstein, Gibson, Shure, etc), hospitality, and specialty retailers (apparel, consumer packaged goods). I love craft beverages, music, and have a lot of retail experience on the floor. So I could quickly contribute to the conversation while I learned the company's specific business. And I was a programmer when I got started so I had learned the finance from CPAs, mfg from APICS gurus, retailers from former C-levels, etc to round me out. You'll fell over your head a lot, but putting in 2hrs for every 1hr and being hungry will help you really gain that confidence quickly. 

All that said, for learning, there are so many free resources out there. From places like MIT, Harvard, , LinkedIn, etc that offer free learning at a generalist level as opposed to things like learn.microsoft.com which has free documentation to every MS product, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/docs/. I have a lot of Microsoft MVP friends that put out a ton of free content too. And if its something specific like Snowflake, go to YouTube or similar and type in "Snowflake vs" or "Snowflake pros cons" or "why snowflake" so you can see how it matches up against things like Databricks and business decisions driving technical changes in an org. You'll have the perspectives on alternatives and why a customer went with the solution or things they don't like using discrete terms you may not know very much about, but you know how they help/hurt the solution. 

Don't worry about memorizing things either. You just need to familiarize with it all so you start reading between the lines and can level up. Once you start hearing repeat things in different formats or opposing views, you'll quickly move from the understand/knowledge level on the Bloom's taxonomy pyramid to the evaluation cognitive level where you're drawing opinions and recommendations based on real data. thats really where you want to be, and be honest with where you are on that scale from a technology, industry, and functional perspective. 

Most of all, have fun! Hope this helps some people