A quick reflection on the first week of training, two days into the second.
At the end of last week I stayed around after work, to get a few drinks with my new colleague, and many of them were interested to know how I'd found the first five days. For many it had been several months or even years since they'd been through the training, so they were keen to know how I was getting on in comparison. My response was simple: I'd really enjoyed it! The work we'd been doing in particular on data cleaning and reshaping I'd found particularly interesting, and I'd really got to grips with Tableau Prep and was enjoying the Preppin' Data challenges.
Their response, though, was almost universal, particularly from the more recent graduates: "Uh huh. Well, get ready, it's going to get a whole lot harder." The learning would, I was brutally informed, become extremely intense, and not let up for a single day of the next 16 weeks. And at the end of Tuesday on the second week, as it turns out: yep, I see what they meant. The instruction's coming thick and fast, and spending ten seconds or so this morning trying to remember where I'd last seen a particular file meant I'd suddenly missed a couple of steps on the Tableau demo.
But no worries, because I'm still really enjoying it! It's challenging, it's interesting, it's fun, and I know there'll be a great future to come from it at the end. So, really, here's to the next 78 days!