<p>I get asked by junior-level graduates and candidates in data engineering, analytics, and data science about what to do to succeed in today's challenging job market. With AI rapidly changing employer expectations, there's understandably a lot of anxiety today, particularly among juniors.</p><p><br /></p><p>In this Freestyle Friday, I answer in terms of what I'd do if I was a junior candidate today - the necessary tech and personal skills, my top 5 traits in a candidate, and building one's network.</p><p>Obviously I can only speak from my perspective, but hopefully there's some helpful advice here.</p><p>-----------------------</p><p>Sponsor: Revefi </p><p>Save serious money on your cloud costs with Revefi’s new autonomous AI DBA, a tool built to handle the gritty reality of cloud data management so you can stop babysitting your infrastructure.</p><p>With a five-minute, zero-touch setup, it deploys 18 specialized agents across your data estate to automatically manage FinOps, performance tuning, and data quality. If you want to cut your cloud costs by 30% to 70% and get back to actual data architecture, check out what they are building at <a href="https://www.revefi.com/ai-dba?utm_source=email&amp;utm_medium=external&amp;utm_campaign=ai_dba_email_campaign_june_2026&amp;utm_content=inf_outreach" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">revefi.com/ai-dba</a></p>