You don't need to work for a company with large datasets to start learning and playing with large datasets. There are freely available repositories of data you

You don't need to work for a company with large datasets to start learning and playing with large datasets. There are freely available repositories of data you can play with. Checkout the AWS public datasets - https://aws.amazon.com/public-datasets/ https://aws.amazon.com/public-datasets/. There should be more then enough there for you to start playing with "big data" tools and getting familiar with how to store, ETL, and query large datasets.