Faith McKenna

My name is Faith McKenna. I’m a data practitioner, writer, and technical instructor. I came to the data industry from education, and I currently manage a team of technical instructors at dbt Labs. I think the data industry is such an interesting place to be, and I’m interested in how technology + modern life shapes our behavior at work and at home. I write about those things, and more, on my blog. Check it out, click the button in the upper right corner.

Background

I currently work at dbt Labs, managing a team of world-class technical instructors who empower organizations to create reusable data assets with dbt in a hands-on setting. I worked as a technical instructor myself for a little over two years before stepping into the management role.

Prior to dbt Labs, I worked as a data analyst at a supply chain insurance startup called Parsyl. I learned a lot about building a data function from scratch, and owned our entire dbt codebase there. Before that, I worked in master data management at PopSockets.

The bulk of my work experience prior to corporate America was in the education and non-profit space. I loved that part of my career, and bring the scrappy attitude and jack-of-all-trades mentality into my corporate era.

Skills

• Technical training + teaching
• HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Data visualization
• Analytics Engineering Certified 2x, expiring Nov. 2028
• Technical writing
• Curriculum design + course construction
• dbt, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Looker, Hex