At some point in your career, you will face the paradox of needing to gain experience to move your career forward, but no one is willing to giving you a chance because you don’t have the experience. This is often seen early in one’s career when searching for that first or second job out of college. In this scenario, you have very little on the job experience. It is also seen later on in one’s career if they are trying to make a pivot. In this scenario, you have some skills that are transferrable, but other new ones you may need to learn.
This week, Jim, Jason, and Jon tackle the steps one could take in various stages of their career to gain experience and get around this paradox.
THINGS WE MENTIONED
- USBHarpoon Hacking
- USB Condom
- Chris Wareham
- ETSU, Adobe alliance to equip students with leading-edge skills
- Utah.gov Open Data Catalog
- Kaggle
- Kaggle Datasets
- Iris flower dataset (The Data Analysis equivalent of Hello World)
THANK YOU
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It was a fantastic conversation and a lot to unpack.
For myself becoming an analyst was a natural fit for me. It was crunching numbers before the digital age using Lotus 123 and getting flat files.
Getting into the Digital Analyst role happened by accident. I was looking for a job and landed in the Travel Industry. The e-commerce group was looking for a reporting and analyst person. There was no mention of web analytics. Over my career there I became the “analyst” and as Jason talked about I brought more analysis into the position. Working in the financial services sector before learning those what I call basic analytical skill sets helped add value to the position.
When you become the analyst in an organization, you have to learn to build relationships across lines of authority because the data impacts decision making on so many levels. There is a certain mindset of understanding how business flows and where does all the data fit.
Because I have bounced around professionally and not having access to use the enterprise tools it forces you to get out of comfort zone. Having a former colleague who started his own online business I asked him if I could analyze his website. At first, he hesitated until I told him I would do it for free. He gave access to the Google Analytics account, and from there I developed my style for analyzing data.
While building my practice and dealing with many different types of businesses worldwide, you learn to ask questions. Being an analyst is like being a good storyteller. It is about understanding what the client’s expectations are, determining the flow of the business, and being prepared to tell the client the good the bad and the ugly if required.
When trying to find a job in the corporate sector, human resources are the guardians at the gate. There is a knowledge gap, and their mindset tends to be keyword driven. Where someone can get past that gate is to demonstrate how much value they added to their prior role regardless of the tools they used.
Lastly, get out of your comfort zone. It is not all about Googe Analytics and Adobe Analytics anymore. Learning Python or R and having those skills sets is desirable but you have to be a practitioner. The best advice was from the college intern that worked for me when it comes to learning either language is patience and practice. We now live in an era that we can usually find a solution on YouTube.