Hey there, everybody. Recent joiner who's been lurking. I have been searching the posts here and gotten some great info from them, but I've now got some questions of my own. Hopefully, they're ones that others have and they might benefit from the thread, as well.

TL;DR: I feel like I need more skills to apply for new positions, and I don't know which skills to learn or the best places to cultivate them that an employer would recognize as legitimate.

I am currently working as a Data Analyst (though that title is a reach, you'll see why below) since Spring of 2022. It's my first corporate position, though not close to my first work experience, and I have advanced very quickly. I am in line for my second promotion right now, depending on the completion of some goals. The trouble is, this company fucking sucks. It's a mess at every level. I am one of the most competent people on my team "data analytics" wise, and some of these people have been here for the better part of a decade. I really don't say that to make myself sound like some sort of savant, but to highlight just how poor the standards of quality and skill are. Our R&D department is basically one guy whose file organization is about as clear as muck. All it took to be a walk-on was some creativity and a VERY baseline understanding of computers.

All of this to say that I do not have the same industry skills as other data analysts. My team is really pigeon-holed in the scope of what we do. Without giving away too much detail, it's basically just bioinformatics quality assurance. So the softwares I now know, and the processes I have learned, are largely industry and company specific. I opted to teach myself Excel macro construction to make my own life easier. I'm only one of two out of 15 people on my team that knows how to make them. All of it is self study. I can't go to anyone at my company, because they don't know anything, either. They don't even "allow" us to use SQL, and the data we produce is far, far too large for Excel.

I am currently finishing up the Google Data Analytics Certificate on Coursera. But I don't feel that any of it is enough when I read these job ads. There's another course that follows this one, but I'm thinking that I'd rather pivot to data science. That just leaves me with more uncertainty on which skills to invest in.

All this to ask: once I've completed the Data Analytics cert, what do next? Those boot camps don't seem worth it price wise, and I imagine that workforce is very saturated. I have considered applying to graduate programs for bioinformatics, but I'm on the fence about returning to academia unless I can get some sort of grant, and that's so competitive these days I'm not sure if I will outshine other candidates. I have some experience in JS. I am learning Python, R, and SQL. I have ordered the book "Automate the Boring Stuff" for my python learning, too.

Once I decide what to do, it'll be easy. I'm very good at learning these things and solving my own issues as I learn (which is most computer shit anyways). The problem I have is that I just don't feel like I have a good read on the industry outside of the very small corner I'm in.

Thank you in advance. Sorry that got so long-winded.