Google's official Analytics Academy at skillshop.withgoogle.com is the starting point. The GA4 course covers core concepts, event tracking, and reporting fundamentals. It's free, structured, and gives you the terminology you need before touching a property. Once you finish the basics, open a live GA4 property—even a small site or demo account—and configure events, conversions, and custom reports. Reading documentation doesn't stick until you've debugged why an event parameter isn't showing up or why funnel drop-off looks wrong. Hands-on repetition builds muscle memory faster than watching videos. For tactical workflows and troubleshooting, Measure School (Julius Fedorovicius) and Analytics Mania (both on YouTube) publish step-by-step walkthroughs that go beyond Google's surface-level tutorials. They cover GTM integration, ecommerce tracking, cross-domain setups, and BigQuery exports—real scenarios you'll hit managing client accounts. Avoid $300+ Udemy courses unless they're recent (post-2023) and from a recognized instructor. GA4 changed too fast between 2020 and 2023, so older material teaches deprecated interfaces or missing features. If you're spending money, Loves Data's GA4 course or CXL's analytics track are worth the cost, but only after you've exhausted free resources. At Ottawa SEO, we onboard new team members by having them complete Analytics Academy, then shadow a live client migration from Universal Analytics. They audit existing tags, replicate key events in GA4, and reconcile discrepancies in reporting. This catches edge cases—like session timeout differences or attribution model shifts—that courses skip. GA4's learning curve is steeper than Universal because it's event-based, not pageview-centric. Budget 15–20 hours to get functional: 4 hours on Academy, 6 hours building a test property, and the rest watching advanced tutorials. You'll be dangerous enough to run client accounts, but mastery takes months of daily use and metric validation against known benchmarks.