What am I doing wrong: Tech/data applications

[ShinyNewStart]

Wise women of MN, I turn to you for careers advice. I'm trying to change careers but I'm not even getting interviews. I'm hoping you'll be able to point out somewhere obvious that I'm going wrong. Do I need to suck it up and do some internships or training, or is there a job title search I've missed?

The job I want: something data driven and analytical, but not pure code engineering. I want to contribute to developing larger scale concepts and solutions, rather than just coding. I'd consider almost any field. I'm good at data visualisation, hacking together complete programs quickly, public speaking and coming up with concepts to solve problems. I've tried searching for data analyst, researcher, machine learning and data scientist on LinkedIn.

My background (a nightmare): I'm leaving academia after 10 years. I was working with machine learning and statistics in the physical sciences, but I don't have a degree in maths or computing. I'm really smart (I know, I know) and would be able to learn any new coding language or process within a month, but because I generally work on scientific stuff, I don't have clients, don't use cloud based systems (although I understand the theory) and don't have experience with all the latest gizmos, but know I could learn it. I do have a really solid understanding of the statistics and algorithms underlying data science and I'd be able to find a way to solve almost any problem.

I'm getting rejected from graduate jobs for being too old and experienced, but rejected from more advanced jobs for not having 3-5 years of technical corporate experience. I don't really want to spend 5k getting a diploma for machine learning or business intelligence because I can already do everything offered on the courses, but I can't prove it.

Any advice or experience would be massively appreciated!

and would be able to learn any new coding language or process within a month

Seriously? I'd be wary of anyone, irrelevant of background if they casually thought they could get up to a required standard in a month. Especially one who then said they didn't have any sql experience when for a self motivated person it's easy enough to find courses including sample data online.

I think powerbi is a different skill from python. I mean, I’m sure you can pick it up, but probably needs a bit of time investment if you want that. Another thing is to consider how long you will be in Netherlands. I think different countries can have different things they put more emphasis on with recruitment.

In U.K. there are some junior/grad jobs that are open to people with non-traditional backgrounds. Perhaps some pharma or chemical producer companies may be good to try (with your phys sciences background)?

Keep going - I started hobby coding alongside my healthcare job for about 3 years before the right opportunity came up.

@lljkk Not relevant to this thread but a different example of that might be:

1. Entry level in processing role
2. Customer services relating to processing
3. Leadership role in customer services
4. HR role (employee relations) advising leadership role
5. Internal HR move to gain experience in other HR specialisms
6. HR Business Partner role

Do you have a GitHub to show examples of your coding? It there a project you can volunteer for or create as a way to show off your skills? Eg: build a little website with a map of all the local garden & stats on how sunny they are (that is a silly example, but pick something that interests you & where you can share some data).

Asks manager.com has lots of good advice for CVs and covering letters.

I would definitely do some basic training in R, BI and SQL and then just add self taught to your cv. Those 3 are top of the list, along with python at my company. I sift out people all the time from the application process who don't have them. I have interviewed people who don't have them and even though I'm sure they'd pick them up quickly, if I've got someone else who already has them of course I'm going to go with them.

In terms of role type. Have you looked at management information? Tends to be an internal team reporting on the health of the business using a variety of data sources eg financial, sales, people data, time streets. There's an element of being able to present and communicate your findings so not just a pure data role. Seems a lot of the big companies have depts doing just this.

Thanks again everyone, especially for more job titles to search!

I'm half way through my second SQL course on Coursera (although the guy presenting is driving me nuts!), and then I'll move onto some BI courses. I didn't expect self-taught/online courses to be considered relevant because I assumed that companies would want you to learn their standard on their systems and you'd learn on the job, or you'd be expected to have learnt in a formal university setting. I guess that's a bit old-fashioned now. Don't worry, Aquatic, I wouldn't dream of describing myself as proficient after 3 weeks. Very short term contracts have always meant that I'm expected to be useful within my first week in a new job, so I'm good at picking up enough to contribute very fast.

That's an interesting approach to CVs, HairyMH. Mine's definitely made that way with a clear story for an academic career. The problem with an academic career is the way to the top is to rack up as many positions at prestigious universities as possible to prove you have a good network and broad training. Unfortunately, I can really see that to an outsider 12 month contracts in lots of different countries make you look like feckless, footloose, indecisive employee, who might bugger off to teach diving in Thailand at any minute! It's an absolute nightmare, because the crazy mobility requirements (for me, already 5 international moves in 4 years) are partly why I'm leaving, but they also make my CV a disaster.

I'm a contractor, which is my way of getting round the tick box requirements that a lot of roles require. They also don't care too much about job hopping. I had quite a mixed cv history when I started. Are you intending to stay in NL?

Yes, I'm staying here for good and looking to get citizenship eventually.

I thought about contracting to get experience, but I'm not confident enough about my technical skills and the difference between scientific and business coding. It's also pretty complicated setting up as self-employed as a non-EU immigrant, and the lack of pension and employment rights was another reason to leave academia!

I'm missing SQL and AWS which seem to come up for almost every job. I can follow a course, but without a dataset, it's really hard to actually get useful experience.

Loads of employers look for cloud experience e.g. AWS, GCP and most people don't have it. Plus the different services and tools the cloud providers have changes quite frequently at the moment. This is one area where taking a course and getting certified as long as you make it clear it isn't one of your core skills is OK.

SQL you should really have experience.

In regards to data sets there is stuff on the web as governments e.g. UK government releases some raw data free. Like this - data.gov.uk/ and this - www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets. However it is up to you to work with it to get it in the format you want from APIs and CSV files they release so you can use it in your examples.

Then as a PP put your work on Github.

@ShinyNewStart just try to put a positive brief explanatory note in your covering letter to explain your change of direction and why this new opportunity is exactly what you are looking for because of the skills that you have acquired elsewhere - you are prepared to roll your sleeves up and do anything that is required - sometimes complete honesty can be completely refreshing, builds trust and a connection. Look for an analyst level - in our business that's someone who isn't a fresh fish, first proper job after coming through a grad course.
In the UK Intern positions are advertised like jobs through Universities - sometimes you have to take a step back to take a step for forward and if you are a risky hire, that's one brilliant way for a company to get to know your worth before offering you a permanent job.
You need to shift gear because as you know your current appraoch is not working and I don't know about where you are but here the job market for techie people is very strong for the candidates.
Also consider joining an employment agency - try getting into a company doing something different and temporary (easier to access) and then applying to their internal jobs - you just need to get a foot in] and prove your metal.

Towel-Potato, HairyMooHead - does that mean that you want to see career progression in 'the story'. Without that you distrust the applicant? So you want to see that someone seems to be progressing towards a goal?

What happens to someone who has a lot of experience in Industry X but then applies for a very junior position with your employer, in Industry Y? Do you reject them because they have changed trajectory?

Also I'm not sure if there are groups in the Netherlands but in the UK, US and a few other European countries like Spain there are technology focus groups on meetup.

Join groups in your main skill areas and do a talk.

The talk doesn't have to be on difficult technical stuff it can be on a new technology related to that particular groups focus that you have experimented with or the talk can be on soft skills e.g. how I organise myself to do xx.

You can then mention it on your CV.

Plus lots of companies especially SMEs don't advertise their roles properly so joining such a group will give you access to more roles.

Definitely get up to speed with cloud based solutions. Speak to some recruiters and find what the hot skills are right now.

Look at the cloud based platforms like Salesforce - huge growth there and a strong presence in the Netherlands. You can train yourself for free using the open access My Trailhead platform. There are many success stories where people have developed their own skills doing this and then had a successful career as a Salesforce professional.

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/

@ragged - Someone who is changing career trajectory is already on the back foot - we are a knowledge rich industry - you need to understand the problem (historical and current) before you can solve it.

If they want to move industry and slide back down the ladder - I want to know why before I recommend them for interview and they rarely mention it...a junior position with us is not a lifestyle choice to relieve the stress of a senior management position.

The applicants I have come across making a leap over industries, have had a few common issues with their applications - they continued to use jargon/acronyms and technical terms unique to their previous industry without defining them or even being aware that they are not common parlance, often their CVs make little sense at all - they haven't considered their audience - their communication skills are as important to us as their excellent technical skills, speaking in plain English is an underrated skill.

And they talk about "transferable skills" (a lot) without outlining exactly what these were and how they believe they would be of value to us.

So if I could've understood their story it might have been a good start - but they so were so busy trying to be impressive and technical they forgot they were supposed to be communicating.

Your industry sounds very competitive to get into, HMH!!

I think I tend to go for jobs where nobody else close to qualified applies, so applicant hands get bitten off. DH (does techie stuff) mostly gets jobs thru word of mouth. He doesn't have a progression timeline or story, either, probably.

@ragged

Your industry sounds very competitive to get into, HMH!!

I think I tend to go for jobs where nobody else close to qualified applies, so applicant hands get bitten off. DH (does techie stuff) mostly gets jobs thru word of mouth. He doesn't have a progression timeline or story, either, probably.

It requires quite specialist knowledge - people with both excellent technical and people skills are a rare bunch, they have their pick of the jobs and are well rewarded.

Amstelveen for pure tech companies, Hilversum for media and Eindhoven for start-ups.

I'd also be "surprised" by anyone without a coding background who claimed to be fluent within a month.

@Hairymoohead Have just found this thread and those are some great tips for career changers generally. Thank you!

I'm also hoping to career change to something tech-related.

Can I ask an honest question about age for career changers? It's hard enough carer changing but especially when you have 15+ years experience under your belt.

Could you give an honest appraisal of the challenges someone in digital/tech areas might face?

Excuse typo - career changing, not carer changing. As you can see, I have creaky joints and RSI after hammering a keyboard for those 15+ years.....

Have you thought about getting into cyber security? That's a growing field and there aren't many people about with the analytical mind to do it. You sound like you could easily fit the requirements. From what I've read, most companies want people with the right brain and train them up once employed.

PS I believe you about learning coding languages in a month because I'm the same! It goes hand in hand with being able to learn spoken languages. Some people, like us, have an aptitude for it :)

I never thought of the skills as being similar, but you're right @RedBonnet. It's being able to see that a sentence needs a verb, object, noun etc or a program needs some data, memory allocation, mathematically sound equations and a sensible structure. You might not have the vocabulary immediately, but that's what Google's for. My first languages were German and Fortran, which probably helps because they both demand very precise usage and thinking! French and Python feel obvious after them.

Too true about precision in German @ShinyNewStart. I'll never forget the 12 different contexts for using the word 'the'!

Hi @ShinyNewStart sorry I haven't read all posts if someone already said it, but for your CV could you not group your academic positions into one or few buckets e.g 2015-2020 Researcher in XY & list skills and responsibilities. Good luck for the career move I've moved into a similar area although in the UK & was lucky enough to have a degree but I 100 % know a degree won't make you better in these jobs, just makes it easier to get them.

I'm also a female immigrant without citizenship (yet) from a non EU country. With no programming background - but I am now a programmer. I have also done business intelligence jobs and pivoted my way into my current role (which requires both technical ability and people skills).

From what I can see you have 3 major problems :

1. All the jobs you're looking for (aside from data analyst) require highly technical skillsets and a degree in something that (while not maths based) need a very strong mathematical and statistical foundation.
2. You don't understand programming languages (not a big deal as you're not a programmer - but it could be coming across in your CV). 'Learning' and 'mastering' a language are 2 different things. It takes me a week to create a fully working application in a new language following the internet. It takes me 6 months to do things in a way that's a) efficient and b) doesn't make everything break at the slightest change in assumption for example.

1. Related to points (2) and (3) - large scale strategic solutions require more than a shallow understanding of programming languages and a lot of corporate/political experience. Because the job is 10% coming up with the solution and 90% persuading everyone else to agree.

My advice?
Aim mainly for data analyst jobs that would be enhanced by your technical skills. There are a lot of jobs that involve data skills (such as cybersecurity analyst, 'something something' analyst) that don't come with the title 'data analyst'. However they are in actual fact data analyst jobs - just that HR prefer giving the job the name of what they're specifically analysing rather than data analyst because well HR . There are lots of these that would suit your background but it's hard to find because of the name - I will try to provide some examples. In a specialist company your academic bacjground would be a perfect match!

Go to the search sites of major employers (financial institutions, NHS, retariler etc).
Search for the world analysts - ONLY analyst. Nothing else.
They say they 'want prior experiemce' but all companies overstate their requirements

Below some examples

tarta.ai/j/tRYj5XkB5JkM4hVkkETC-cyber-financial-intelligence-analyst-in-knutsford-cheshire-at-barclays?utm_campaign=google_jobs_apply&utm_source=google_jobs_apply&utm_medium=organic

www.totaljobs.com/job/operations-analyst/missguided-ltd-job93489698?utm_campaign=google_jobs_apply&utm_source=google_jobs_apply&utm_medium=organic