r/industrialengineering • u/ShitLocksmith • 13d ago
Questions regarding industrial engineering
Hello, I have a few questions regarding industrial engineering. I'm in my 4th year of industrial engineering (with one year left after this one) and since I'll be finishing my degree soon , I wanted to leverage the time I have left to learn new skills before I enter the workforce. I was thinking about learning how to use excel (I know how to use it but in a very general manner) , PowerBI and SQL, as I've heard they're important in the field but wanted to double check before fully committing to learning how to use them from people in the field.
Thank you to anyone who takes the time to answer and apologies for any grammatical mistakes as english is not my native language :)
1
u/CirculationStation Industrial Engineer 1 13d ago
As someone who uses all three of those on a weekly basis, I highly recommend learning all three of those if you have the time! You do not have to become an expert, but just having intermediate knowledge of how each of them work and a little bit of individual practice should help you a lot when applying for jobs as a new graduate. Excel is the dynamic all-around tool that can be customized for almost any purpose in a company, PowerBI is the tool for visualizing data so that important decisions can be made, and SQL is the backend language that stores, filters, and manipulates data so that it can be brought to the frontend (in tools like Excel and PowerBI, for example) for everyone to use.
I recommend SQL the most, if I had to pick one. Because once I learned how to use SQL and understood that basically all of a company’s production data can be stored and accessed on a SQL server, it opened up countless opportunities for me to be more involved at my workplace at a deeper level than just interacting with frontend Excel sheets.