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Focus on Python and sql. Get good at querying the data you need and scripting your analysis. These are skills that are applicable to so many use cases in consulting and tech. Basic understanding of ML would help to.
Building an app is broad. Knowing how to build a web app or mobile app likely won’t help you progress in consulting. Knowing a little about the pieces of an app and what is involved in building it will be useful.
As an SWE, coding is overrated. It’s just a tool, like Excel. Master the business, coding is a commodity these days.
Chief
I’m in the minority obviously. But I think everyone would benefit to understand a crash course in object oriented programming and very basic relational database design. If only to better understand the simple limitations of what you are asking out of downstream development teams.
Pro
As someone who has been coding since 12, don't learn programming, it's a waste of time unless you want to do dev work. Scripting and automation is always handy though, I'd nothing else but to make your own workload easier
Pro
Oh and on that note, REGEX is extremely useful to learn too
I hate a dozens of spreadsheet of all employees I had to match by name. Issue is there would be
"John Doe"
"Doe, John"
"John J Doe"
"Doe, John J"
"John Doe II"
REGEX let's you make a pattern that identifies text in numerous formats, so rather than having to spend a lot of time normalizing the data before matching, I made a quick regex that dynamically understood names
Edit: fyi regex is a tool *on top of* programming languages, python, VBA, and MS apps should all support Regex to some extent
What are you angling for then? You might want to focus more on low code no code software made for analysts like alteryx or power platform.
ML models would be python or R ... but if you’re not looking to be a tech guy, there’s usually tech guys available to code for you. The low code no code softwares out there also have basic ML algorithms capabilities like linear regression and isolation forests but you might need python to add or adjust for extras
Even if you’re not angling to be the “tech guy”, if you ever want to manage a technical project or collaborate with other tech folks, I think it’s good to understand a bit of coding. It’ll help you get a sense for how data / software engineers approach problems, how long tasks take, what sort of issues you might run into / how to resolve them.
Treat it like learning a musical instrument as a beginner. If you don’t find it interesting, just quit. If you don’t need to do your job now, it doesn’t help or hurt you either way. You’ll never be as good as someone who dedicated their life to it, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be interesting to learn.
Like the McK fella said, SQL and Python are your tools. It’s the kind of programming you can use “on the side” to make your life easier and add value. Very big on data analysis, combine well together and you see more and more people skilled in them without being tech people. The rest of the languages, you either know well and work predominantly with them or you don’t bother. I.e you are either a C/JAVA/Ruby programmer and that’s your job or you know nothing about them.
I would only do data analysis. Python for data analysis specifically and SQL will set you up well.