Many of you may know the subject of today's interview already..."Good guy Luca" Rocchetti, the winner of the Maven Vacation Challenge, who gave away his free membership because he thought someone else could benefit even more.

I've talked to Luca many times, and am a big fan of his. Getting to interview him about his career growth was a special treat.

Luca offers some great advice about the mindset you need for continous learning, and also shares some very detailed pointers about the sequence he thinks you should learn various Analyst technical skills.

Great guy, with a valuable story to tell. I hope it helps you!

Here we go...

Q: Professionally speaking, what do you do today? How important is data mastery to your current role?

Today I work as a Sr. Analyst, so data mastery is essential. I have been working in both (strategic, not digital) marketing and sales, and I must say both are very interesting. In marketing I had to think more strategically about how to improve the performance or, more in general, bring an extra benefit to the company; in sales, I think more about the revenue, the profit, and the margin.

Q: What do you think have been some of the key factors in your success?

Throughout my career, two factors had the biggest positive impact, and I believe they also are correlated to each other: curiosity and continuous learning.

Curiosity is what stimulated me to learn more about different topics, and brought me to keep learning something every day. However, a great piece of advice here is to understand what’s really interesting for you and go for it. I was interested in so many different things, that for a period I got stuck and was not going anywhere. I was starting a course and then moved into something completely different and then again on something completely different. I was learning a bit of everything but it was not enough for nothing. I’m not saying to become the guru of something, I actually think that diversifying your skills is a great asset, but just limit the topics and focus on the selected ones.

Q: You mentioned Maven has made a positive impact on your career. Can you tell us more about that?

At the very beginning of my career, I was struggling in visualizing data from two different sources. I remember thinking of how nice it would have been if I could make a pivot including both tables. I didn’t know it was possible. A former colleague of mine suggested to me one of Chris’s excel courses. I ended up taking all of them.

Q: Let's jump back in time. Think about yourself on the day you started your first Maven course. How long ago was that? What was your job at the time? How would you rank your data skills on a scale of 1-10 back then?

I took my very first course in 2016, and at that time I knew all I knew about analytics was what I studied at the university. I studied international business, so I just had a couple of classes on topics related to analytics, so I knew very little, but I had great marks on those courses, and they were the ones I got more interested in. Back then, my job was in operations and I was transitioning into planning. I thought I had a good amount of data (now I’d say I actually had a very limited amount) and I wanted to give them some structure, or in any case, try to get some information from them.

Q: Which Maven courses have you taken? Do you have any particular favorites that you think have helped you the most?

I took all the Maven courses apart from the ones about database management because it’s a bit far from what I do and where I want to land in the future (probably a few years back I’d have not been able to make this selection and would have gone for them as well).

All of them were important for me and helped me grow. My suggestion is to follow some logical path though.

My personal sequence would be excel -> power BI –> SQL –> tableau –> ML (the last 3 are interchangeable in my opinion).

The first one is excel because it’s the basis, and you need to know it. You may not use it that much anymore in the future but you still need to know it.

Then Power BI because is also from Microsoft, connects well with excel, and has a similar interface so it’ll be easier to learn.

I don’t code at work (and I avoided the data science path) because I decided I want to be in a more strategical role, but most of the software I use creates SQL scripts in the background and being able to read it, understand it, and sometimes even modify and adjust it is very important. That’s why I went for that course.

Tableau in my opinion is the best one (at the moment) for creating stunning visualization. At work, I normally use Tableau to create dashboards and Power BI to make analysis (it’s incredible what you can do with DAX and M in a single program).

Q: Is there anything else you think would be valuable for our audience to hear about your career journey?

My suggestion is to be curious, and always be open to learning. If I look back to when I started I can say I made huge improvements but if I look at my to-do list and things I’d like to learn or to go deeper, I feel like what I have done so far was just a warm-up.

Q: If our readers are interested in getting in touch with you, what is the best way for them to connect or find more information?

The best way to get in contact with me is by dropping me a message on LinkedIn.

I am also working on creating a personal website with a contact form, but at the moment it’s not finalized yet. I will be happy to share it with you once ready, but I don’t expect it to be ready before the end of the year as I’m working on a few more projects at the moment that gets a higher priority.

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Such great career advice here. Thanks for sharing your story Luca!