One of my 2022 goal is to sharpen my FP&A technical toolkit, and learning SQL naturally becoming top of the list as it’s commonly used language to extract data form company database, so to do more in depth analysis rather than just focus on financial numbers.

With 5th Wave of Covid here in HK and WFH arrangement from the company, It allow more time for me to do more research on the web and notice there are so many ways to learn SQL. But I want to make it right this time - I want to learn the bacis with real-live context. Luckily I came across Datacamp, which quite fit into my learning style.

Datacamp has a good blend of theoretical short videos, guided exercises and practical assessment to test your knowledge and provide instant constructive feedback on areas you need to work more on. It took me around 1 month time to understand the basis, and able to draw data for simple data analysis. Hurray!

But as a FP&A professional, we need to bear in mind that the our analytical skills with good understanding on the business financials so to guide financial centric decision is still our primary skill and where our values comes in, whereas tools like Excel and SQL is a medium to make it happen. We don’t need to over-worry to be the ‘ultimate coder’ but we just need to stay relevant.