“How can a beginner data scientist like me gain experience?”
By: Daniel Bourke
Tags: Careers, Machine Learning, Data Science, Career Advice, Towards Data Science

Get to know someone

Many job openings aren’t even listed.

My first (and only) job at a technology company came by someone seeing what I was posting on LinkedIn who happened to know someone who knew someone who might be interested in talking to me. I ended up meeting this person (shoutout to Cam), who turned out to be a complete and absolute living legend, had a conversation on what I’d been working on, he asked if I’d like to come in for a day next week, I did, then another day and after two days, I was offered a role.

What should be noted in this scenario is I did have foundational skills, far from world-class, but I wasn’t walking in there not knowing what a pandas DataFrame was or how to troubleshoot and lookup questions on Stack Overflow (yes, many hours of my days, even months into my job were spent researching and Googling things, remember, an engineer is someone who “figures things out”).

For many of our future hires (especially juniors), they were because someone knew someone.

I see it like this: job portals are dead.

They may work for some but to me, I pretend they don’t. I tell myself, it’s easy to apply through that button, it’s harder to go above and beyond, find the person I should talk to, talk to them, show them what I’ve been working on, take their advice, listen to their feedback, work on my skills, follow-up and show them and potentially get an offer. Whereas, if I apply through a job posting, it’s an instant no (maybe not, but again, that’s what I tell myself).

Of course, in an ideal world (though, maybe not ideal), companies would hire off talent and ability alone, but that’s not how people work. People like to work with people they like.

Okay, so how do you get to know someone?

If you’re going the digital route, keep it simple. Just as you emailed me (Manuela emailed me a very succinct and specific email, as you’ve seen above). Short and sweet. Be direct with your questioning.

I got an interview at Airbnb because I sent a recruiter (found by doing research), a message on LinkedIn. She replied within a day saying, “Hey Daniel, are you available for a call tomorrow?”. I didn’t get the job but I’m certain I got closer than if I had applied through their job portal (which I didn’t even do).

Again, this process is not guaranteed.

You may message 100 people and get 0 replies. Similarly with applying for 100 jobs and getting 0 offers. And if your scorecard does end up looking something like this, take it as feedback, your way of approaching things may need to improve.

Digital is efficient and remote work is becoming more and more of a thing but people still like interacting (perhaps surprisingly to tech nerds like us) with their meat bodies, as in, being in the same room as each other. This means going to events (when social conditions allow), talking to people, going the extra mile to follow up (see above) with Dave from company X who told you about the project he’s been working on for the past few months.

The tech company I worked for hosts an artificial intelligence Meetup every month. Before I worked for them, I went to one of the Meetups not knowing who they were or that they even existed, 7-months later, I was working there.