Feels like my career has completely stalled
When I graduated college 6 years ago with a bachelor's in MIS, management information systems, I was super excited to get into the job market and start working in databases, developing in SQL, Python, doing all this really cool DBA and data engineering stuff that I was taught in college...
Here's my career so far:
- Data analyst internship
- Data analyst - 1 year
- Business Analyst - 2 years
- Senior Analyst, Business Intelligence - 2 years
- Senior Analyst, data engineering/architecture - 1.5 years
Now, it feels like I'm unhireable and hit a wall. I'm not a competitive enough candidate to be considered for business intelligence roles because I just barely have enough BI experience compared to other people who have 7 to 12 years of experience. I have zero years with my job title actually being data engineer, even though I work in architecture and do a lot of the same things that "data engineers" I'm connected with on LinkedIn due at other companies. Feels like a title they gave me to make my role cheaper because now I can do data engineering without being called a data engineer...
And to top it all off, we are looking down the barrel of AI and offshoring being tripled over the next 5 years. Our company is currently in the midst of offshoring our entire BI department to India, timeless story that we've all heard. The other 15% that they are keeping are going to be supporting AI development....
So I have like no idea what to do with my career at this point. I've tried transitioning into other industries like health care but I get denied from everything, just straight up rejected from every job I apply for because there's so much competition. I don't even think I could land a position for a data engineer position at all because I'm lacking in some certain skills like Java, I've written Java for personal projects I've worked on but I've never done Java programming in a data engineering capacity....
So I'm kind of lost. What the heck do I even do?