How to Set Up a Corporate SQL Training Program

Are you looking to set up a business or corporate SQL training for your company's employees? In this article, we’ll discuss how to build an efficient SQL training program and why the LearnSQL.com platform is the choice of leading tech companies.

If you are responsible for employees’ professional development – especially in a data-driven company – you know that SQL is essential for anyone who works with data. This programming language can enhance the performance of data and business analysts (for whom SQL is often a primary tool) as well as marketers, salespeople, HR specialists, auditors, and many more.

Many companies include SQL training in their employee onboarding process. Why? Because SQL helps democratize data and make the company truly data-driven. It’s not hard to see how much your business can gain from employee SQL training, but setting up a training program that meets the needs of different specialists can be a very challenging task. So, let’s explore what SQL is, who needs to learn it, and how to set up an effective SQL training program.

SQL Training for Your Employees

SQL, or Structured Query Language, is a programming language used to talk to databases. With SQL, you can store, manipulate, and retrieve data from relational databases. In these databases, data is organized as one or more tables made up of columns and rows. Although this may seem like an IT domain, these concepts are the basis of business effectiveness. Therefore, it is worth ensuring that your employees can use data and base their daily strategic and operational decisions on it.

SQL offers much higher speed and scalability than spreadsheets like Excel, allowing users to process millions of records efficiently. You can learn more about SQL’s advantages in Still Using Excel for Data Analysis? See Why SQL Is Better!

Data analysis conducted using SQL is also easily reproducible – you can use the same queries over and over again to prepare periodical reports. Or you can make slight modifications to perform the same analysis for a different product line, client category, supplier, etc.

Anyone who wants to make data-driven decisions will benefit from SQL training. As the person responsible for employees’ ongoing training, you have to solve quite a challenging problem:

• You have a lot of different employees who need SQL training.
• New employees come and go, and you need to ensure constant SQL training.
• It’s hard to find competent SQL trainers for regular onsite training, as your SQL experts are usually busy with their main job tasks.

Organizing online SQL training online – with an interesting, interactive, and comprehensive learning program that can easily be adapted and administered – can often be the best solution. Let’s see how the LearnSQL.com platform satisfies all these requirements.

7 Reasons to Choose LearnSQL.com Online Courses

LearnSQL.com is an online platform with interactive SQL courses for teams and individuals. The platform has numerous benefits that will make it a perfect choice for your corporate SQL training program:

1. A large selection of courses.com hosts over 60 different SQL courses. There are various difficulty levels, including courses for complete beginners, intermediate users who need to polish their skills, and advanced users who want to learn more complex SQL constructions. In addition, there are also practice sets (with hundreds of interactive exercises that focus on instilling already-acquired skills) and courses on specific business areas (like creating reports). Our comprehensive offer was developed to satisfy the needs of various professionals regardless of their role or initial skill level.
2. Interactive exercises. All LearnSQL.com courses are interactive and include dozens of exercises. Each exercise consists of (1) a brief but thorough explanation, usually with an example, and (2) a corresponding task to be solved by writing an SQL query (i.e. SQL code). The user gets practical experience with SQL right away. All tasks are designed to resemble real-world problems and use a real database; our platform automatically verifies users’ solutions and provides instant feedback.

An exercise with a correct answer

An exercise with an incorrect answer

3. No IT experience needed. Most LearnSQL courses and learning tracks are designed for users with no IT background. There are a few advanced courses that require a solid knowledge of SQL basics, but learners are not expected to know any other computer programming languages. In fact, 80% of our users have “analyst” in their job titles (e.g. data analyst, business analyst, financial analyst, supply chain analyst, etc.). These courses are designed for business professionals who apply their data analysis skills in various settings.
4. Different SQL dialects offered. Although there is a standard version of SQL, there are many versions of the SQL language that are used with different relational database management systems (RDBMS). Our platform offers courses in standard SQL (the foundation for all SQL dialects) as well as Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
5. Team Portal. We also offer a Team Portal feature that gives managers control over the learning progress of other users in their team account. Managers can assign specific courses to different users and see and manage their progress across courses.
6. Used by top companies. Our team successfully designed and implemented an SQL learning program for Uber. We created a series of interactive SQL courses that were customized based on Uber’s database. Over 10,000 Uber employees were trained using our solution.
7. Great reviews! Our customers are very satisfied with LearnSQL.com’s learning programs, referring to them as “well designed”, “easy to use”, and “very challenging but not discouraging”.

If you want to become one of our happy clients, let’s set up an SQL training program tailored to your needs!

Let’s Set Up a Corporate SQL Training Program!

Where do we start? Let’s start with the basics!

Any SQL training program to be applied across the entire organization should include basic courses aimed at users without any prior exposure to SQL. The LearnSQL.com platform offers:

• SQL Basics. This course starts from scratch and covers the most important SQL topics, such as retrieving necessary data from one or more tables, aggregating and grouping data, and combining query results from multiple tables. This course is good even for people with some SQL background; it will allow them to refresh their SQL skills. SQL Basics is available in standard SQL and the MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL dialects – which is very handy if your company uses one of those RDBMSs.
• SQL Fundamentals. This mini-track contains three courses: SQL Basics, How to INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE Data in SQL, and Standard SQL Functions. It is a perfect track for anyone who needs a bit more SQL. It covers retrieving, inserting, modifying, and removing data as well as the most important (and practical) SQL functions. This mini-track is also available in standard SQL and the MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL

The other courses in your SQL training program will depend on your goals and the skill level of your learners. Some common choices include:

• SQL Reporting. This learning track is perfect for intermediate users who want to practice creating complex reports in SQL. It contains three courses: Creating Basic SQL Reports, Revenue Trend Analysis in SQL, and Customer Behavior Analysis in SQL. In the SQL Reporting track, your employees can learn the basic SQL patterns used in SQL reports and explore how to use SQL in a specific business domain – particularly, for analyzing revenue and/or customer behavior. Of course, depending on your needs, you may also assign individual courses from this track to specific employees.
• SQL Practice. This track contains 6 courses that allow users to practice specific SQL topics or fundamental SQL skills with a focus on a particular business domain (e.g. sales).

Additionally, LearnSQL.com offers advanced courses for employees who use SQL frequently and may need to employ the language’s more complex patterns:

• "Window Functions" course. This course covers SQL’s analytical functions, which make building complex aggregations much simpler. It is available in standard SQL, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
• Recursive Queries. This course covers common table expressions (CTEs), often simply called WITH clauses. CTEs let users break a long query into smaller chunks, which makes the query much more readable. CTEs can be recursive, allowing the traversal of hierarchical models of enormous depth. This topic is rarely covered in online SQL courses, but on LearnSQL.com you can master recursive queries in standard SQL, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

Want to Set Up Company SQL Training with LearnSQL.com?

LearnSQL.com’s courses and features make it easy to create online SQL training for any company. Contact us for a free demo – we will be happy to answer any questions. Drop us a line at b2b@learnsql.com and let’s get started helping your business get the most from SQL!