A Few Tips to Get a Job in Data Science from a Junior
By: Laurent Risser
Tags: Projects, Data Science, Portfolio, Resume, Recruitment

A Few Tips to Get a Job in Data Science from a Junior

Getting a job in data science can sometimes be a real challenge. With the recent crisis, the number of jobs available declined everywhere. Meanwhile, the data science field is attracting more and more people, such as graduates from universities and people who are switching fields.

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The competition can be really difficult, and I have experienced this in the past year. After doing a few part-time courses online and in-class (SQL, Cloud Computing for Data Scientists…) and finishing a few projects, I started looking for a job. During my job hunting, I ended tracking my job applications and I realized that I applied to a total of 142 jobs from October 2020 to December 2020. From these, I received eight calls back from recruiters and I received two offers. Note that I was just applying for jobs in Canada, but mainly in the Greater Toronto Area.

From my personal experience, I clearly found out that the biggest step is to get the call back from the recruiters is your resume, and this is the reason why your resume must be perfect.

As I am now working in a tech position, I have the chance to see the other side of the recruitment process and I can share a few tips that can make your resume great for the recruiters and hiring managers. I have gathered those tips from meet-ups I joined, people I have talked to, and also from my own experience as a candidate. Please note as well that this is my personal point of view and some readers might disagree with me. This is totally OK, I agree to disagree with you. Let’s start!

1 — Links, links, links!

If you apply for a job in Data Science like Data Analyst, Data Scientist, Data Engineer, the recruiter will likely love to see projects that you have done, especially when you don’t have professional experience in the field. Therefore, it is important to add at least a link to your GitHub, your Medium articles, and/or your personal website. In my case, I created a simple website on GitHub for free gathering all my info, and I even added a link to my part-time course certificates (hosted on Google Drive) and a link to the website of the companies I have worked for. The idea of doing this is to make life easy for the recruiter or the hiring manager. In some companies, if you don’t have a GitHub linked to your resume you would not be considered.

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In case you have published scientific papers, I also encourage you to put the link to those.

If you are a freelancer, include the link of your Upwork’s profile for example, then the recruiters can review your work and the clients’ feedback.

2 — Avoid the schools' project dataset and do something sexy

This is a tip that I have seen a few times It is fine to do projects using the Titanic dataset and the Monkey flowers data, but you likely want to show more because those datasets have been explored over and over. It is best if you avoid using the popular datasets on Kaggle as your main project as well.

I think the best dataset you can use is your own datasets, like your WhatsApp data for an NLP project. Here is the project I did on WhatsApp:

Alternatively, you can analyze your sports activities on Strava, the music you listened to on Spotify. You could also scrap some data from a website you are interested in. We create so much data everywhere!

Moreover, it’s totally OK to use the script of someone else to prepare or clean your data. You don’t need to create everything but, in that case, please cite the authors you got the work from.

In my part-time course, the instructor used an API for our project and to try to find a project that has never been done before to show that we are able to do more than the average. I ended up doing a project analyzing a political movement in France using the Twitter API. See the article I wrote below.

As Cloud Computing is picking up, I encourage you to do a project on the cloud (GCP, Azure or AWS) as many companies are switching to Cloud Computing and since there is a real lack of people with knowledge on Cloud Computing, it is worth a shot, right? You can pick either GCP, AWS or Azure.

2 — One page only?

During my job hunting, I had the chance to talk to many tech recruiters from Canada and elsewhere, and most of them told me that it’s OK to have a two pages resume, but that having more than that is not good and can be a reason for them to discard you right away. Therefore, you don’t need to squeeze everything into one page, and I would suggest doing a two pages resume.

3 — Match your skills with your projects or work experience

Most likely in your resume, you have a section with all the tech skills you are using and know, like Python, SQL, Tableau, Spark. It’s great to have those skills, however, recruiters would be looking where you have applied those skills either in one of your projects or at a previous job, my suggestion is to make sure that all skills appear in a project or a job description and avoid listing all the popular tech to trick the applicant tracking system.

Try not to list more than seven or eight skills to avoid overwhelming the reader, and don’t list skills that have no chance of being relevant for the job. I would suggest listing only the skills you are really comfortable working with. I read a suggestion that if you have not used a specific tech in the last 5 years it is not needed to include it in your CV.

4— Use a template or create one.

If you are using Microsoft Word, you have likely access to resume templates, you can also find resources online. Some are really great and have been using them almost all the time, it makes your resume more aesthetic and more readable for the recruiters. You can also pick a template and then personalize it.

5 — Avoid the soft skills but prove them!

We all have soft skills, and they are really important to do the job. Here is the list of the most basic skills: communication, teamwork, problem-solving, time management, critical thinking, and decision-making.

I would suggest not to include soft skills into your resume but rather prove them. For example, if you are great at communication you can put the link of an article you wrote online or any other proof. You can also provide evidence about them in r job experience section.

6 — You don’t need to match at 100% the job description

When I first started my job hunting, I realized that I was not matching well many job descriptions; I was scared to apply and I censored myself. After talking to several people in the industry, I realized that the descriptions can be really overwhelming. The description can sometimes be written by someone who is not in the field. I ended up reading the job description more like a wish list from the company and if I was matching most of the main skills then I would move ahead and apply.

In case you ended up being picked by the recruiter, and you don’t know one of the main skills the company is looking for, I would recommend taking a crash course before the interview. For example, I was selected for a job as a Data Engineer in a big corporation and the recruiter told me to be well-prepared on Apache Airflow. A few days before the interview with the manager I took a course on Udemy at $15 to learn Apache Airflow, I learned the basics of it in a few hours. Nevertheless, the manager never asked me any questions about Airflow, and my application got rejected because I was too junior for the position. My energy was not wasted though because I now have some knowledge about this tech.

Photo by AHMED HINDAWI on Unsplash

Another example, in case you know that the company you applied for is using GCP, but you know AWS, I would recommend doing the same steps I did. Take a quick introduction course to know the few basic things about GCP. Then you can even mention to the hiring manager that you don’t know much about GCP, but you just took a course a few days ago. This will show the hiring manager that you are a proactive candidate and that you are willing to do the extra effort.

With those few tips, you might be able to put yourself into a better position among the other candidates, but as the recruitment process is not always a rational process there is also a bit of luck involved.

I have other tips on how to handle the recruitment process once you have been selected by the recruiter, and I will share those in a later article.