search

UKDataServiceOpen / Data-FAQs

The Frequently Asked Questions of data, stats, careers and more.
MIT License
3 stars 1 forks source link

What should I put on my Data CV if I have never had a job? #3

Open joseph-allen opened 3 years ago

joseph-allen commented 3 years ago

What is your FAQ?

CVs - What should I put on my Data CV if I have never had a job?

Who could be qualified to answer this?

Hiring managers, or anybody in industry

Other Comments

I've not had any technical job yet, what should I be using to fill up my data CV?

Any answer below with a high number of thumbs up should be merged as an answer.

JKasmire commented 3 years ago

Experience does not have to be paid experience. You should put any data experience you have, including class projects, personal hobbies, things you set up for a family member who is running a home business, etc. If you really really don't have any data experience, start doing some some data work. Use good documentation and reproducibility best practice so that you can say you have experience of these VITAL aspects of data work.

joseph-allen commented 3 years ago

It might be a bit dated but personally I think Kaggle is a great jumping-off point. They have courses and community-maintained notebook tutorials on getting started with machine learning and exploratory data analysis.

A famous example is the Titanic dataset. Make sure whatever you do here is your best public facing work and put it up on your GitHub or somewhere public when you are done.

Seeing these from entry-level candidates would personally mean I wouldn't offer you a tech test, as long as it's clearly your work or you can explain your code.

lbrierley commented 3 years ago

If you have an undergraduate degree in any applied, natural, or social science - you almost certainly will have had to handle and analyse some kind of data at some point! I've seen some academic-to-industry transition CVs dedicate space to individual projects rather than individual positions. Are there any of those data handling exercises you're particularly proud of, and do they have any outputs and impacts you could describe or show? (e.g., did you present it anywhere, did it require teamwork, did you blog or tweet about it?)

For R users, another nice place to start one such project if you've no experience is Tidy Tuesday, which has weekly data handling and visualisation projects with data sets relevant to wider world issues like equality and diversity, or environmental concerns and sustainability.