Is a career in data worth it?

Mr_Maths

I write this as someone who has 12 years experience but has been unemployed for nearly 6 months.

tacpot12

Your 6 months of unemployment is perhaps only as a result of the pandemic, and otherwise your career has provided you with 12 years of income, so it's not been a bad career from a point of supporting yourself and allowing you to save for your retirement. 

I would not want to be someone who moves around ever 12 months, as it really takes longer for any meaningful improvement to become visible and attributable in business. The people who move rapidly often do so because they don't want their lack of success to become visible. If I learned one thing in my career, it was that value takes time to create. Employers should value the people who stick around to make things work at least as much as the "flash-in-the-pan" types who deliver impetus but not necessarily any value. 

The other thing I learned is that you can't change people's minds about you easily. Moving jobs does give you the opportunity to have a fair evaluation of your skill; providing the appraiser has enough knowledge of what is important. If you are working for inexperienced managers, you won't always get a fair appraisal anyway so don't stress about it.

Dox

Rather a lot of people find data analyst jobs much less interesting than they'd fondly believed - and the pay packet is well below what they expected. 

Being unemployed for must feel like ages, especially with a solid work history behind you, isn't going to leave you in a great frame of mind, let alone a positive one which is open to change - but might now be the moment to consider other options, assuming you've not been actively been pursuing as wide a range of opportunities as possible?

Mr_Maths said:

I write this as someone who has 12 years experience but has been unemployed for nearly 6 months.

Whilst I've had no shortage of recruiters or companies contact me on LinkedIn about jobs, I've not been offered one for nearly 11 years and have been to countless interviews in the last 9. 

This alone bears out the truth of the need to branch out, surely?

AskAsk

I have no experience of data analyst.  is it a statistician?

theoretica

Sounds like so many careers - more people interested than there are jobs, not all jobs are good or interesting jobs or lead to development. Some people progress in the career and some don't and it takes a combination of technical skill, other abilities and luck.

AskAsk

Mr_Maths said:

@AskAsk there is some overlap. It's basically analysing data using mathematical techniques to help make business decisions. In reality its cleaning data that other people have messed up, writing computer code or building dashboards to make the data more user friendly for other people to misinterpret or fudge the data so it can tell people what they want to hear.

do you have any experience of statistical analysing data?  i did work as a statistician for British Gas and Royal Mail when I was at uni as my degree was a sandwich degree.  I found it wasn't for me as I got so bored with it, I couldn't wait to leave when I could go back to uni.

the pay wasn't great, not even for a qualified statistician.  when i got made redundant, in desperation, i applied for a 12 months contract as a statistician for the local government in London as pensions minister was doing a project on pension for the local government staff.

you could therefore look to move into being a statistician as there are plenty of jobs in sectors that are very safe, including the public sector.  if you are used to messing around with data then unlike me, you wouldn't have too much problem with being a statistician.

a colleague of mine also moved into data analyst for an investment bank as they needed data analyst to use data and project patterns for investment.  so you would need maths probability models to extrapolate what will happen to the investment market.  you would need investment knowledge, but you could get into the area with maths and learn about investment?

how old are you may I ask?

Reckless_Saving

I've been in the data space for over 25 years, ignoring covid there is a shortage of applications in certain data skill areas, cloud / spark being an example, also a challenge is when it comes to interview stage many are not tuned to the interview process, some don't bother turning up, some are mega late without a thought to phone up using the contact details they have.  A good proposion of those sitting in the interview room are found to have blagged their 'skills' on the CV.  Took us 2.5 years to fill data engineer roles, initially it was on the companies part for being too wide in their wish list of skill wants, in the end we reduced the grade level of the roles and found good candidates with skills that demostrate they were right for being trained up in the roles and it's turned out well.

Ironically 90% of those I see in the data space have started at the bottom (me included), trained on the job and done loads of self training to remain relevent.  Today there is some much free tools/training that is relevent to the skills that will be in demand for 5 years+.  Download JupyterLab, get it running with spark, get a free learning spark book from Databrick, learn pyspark, sql, parquet, delta, delta lake.

AskAsk

Mr_Maths said:

@AskAsk I'm in my late 30s. Yes statistics is part of it, mainly correlation and regression. I'm in 2 minds as to whether I change careers. On one hand I'm getting interviews for jobs paying as much as £70k and many people have told me it's only a matter of time before I get a job because I'm very good at it. On the other hand, I'm not getting offered these jobs and I've never really been happy with my career.

late 30s may not be too late to change career.  if i were you, i would stick with trying to get another job for another 6 months, so if you have tried for 12 months and still didly squat, then perhaps start thinking about a career change.

you could look into statistician for the public sector as that is where they are mainly employed in the UK from my experience, not that I have a lot of statistician experience!  it is a very secure job and not at all stressful.  you pretty much did nothing and got paid, lol.  that was why i got so bored    you just have to pretend you are doing a lot of work.  i just pretty much did nothing until the last month, when the report was needed.

although on the face of it, the pay is lower than other sectors, if actual money is not important, then it is better value as you are paid for doing nothing and the public sector pension that you would be entitled to would also be extremely valuable.  so as a total package, it isn't as bad it looks on the surface.

if you are looking for high pay and a challenge, then have a look at the investment area.  they are well paid but they are stressful and you would need to take a pay cut as they would need to train you, if indeed they are prepared to take you on, as they can employ mathematicians with professional background and qualifications in finance and investment, so it would be tough to get your foot in the door.

hope you get something soon.

Sandtree

AskAsk said:

I have no experience of data analyst.  is it a statistician?

There are generally three sides to "data", on the one side is how to effectively consolidate and store data in an efficient way, the next is then reporting out of that consolidate data store and creating stock reports/dashboards etc. Finally you get what is more often referred to as data scientist which is seen as more cutting edge data analysis and trying to do more complex analysis... my first encounter with data science was trying to work out to identify the elasticity and propensity of (prospective) customers then build that logic into our pricing engine to maximise revenue over the years.

Certainly statistical knowledge is useful, particularly in data science, but there is a lot of technical knowledge required too such as programming in R or python, SQL, data lakes etc.  Domain knowledge is a bit of a pain, how good will you be at modelling FX risk to recommend the optimum combination of forwards, swaps etc to be bought if you've only ever worked for a UK centric retailer and dont even know what a swap is?  But there is a lot of transferable skills and some recruitment will be done on specific projects and things like Ops or Web etc tends to be more easy to switch industries than very specific domain knowledge... the skill is naturally to get that generic role first and learn the domain specific knowledge to switch over.

I'm a bit of a jack of all trades, officially I'm a programme manager (really a senior project manager but job title inflation keeps happening) however have done the role of a data analyst as I've self taught skills in SQL, R and certain modelling techniques and would rather get the job done than say its not my job.  In the UK we greatly favour experience over pieces of paper and so getting that first job is difficult however for those of us not fresh out of university its about being able to tailor how we talk about our experience and ensure we frame it in the best light for the role you are going for.

Sandtree

Mr_Maths said:

Like I said in my original post I first attempted to find a new job 9 years ago and 100 interviews later (that's an exaggeration, but I may not be that far off that number) I've still not been offered anything. It's not like I'm seeking Head of Analytics roles or anything like that, some of the jobs only require 2 years experience and its a sad of affairs when you're told you don't have enough breadth of experience for one of those. 

Head of Analytics requires a different skill set to a Data Analyst and it could be the problem is that you are not applying for the head of role.

Getting jobs is a bit of a black art and certainly a skill in itself, I know some great BAs who struggle to get work and I know some ok BAs who even in Covid type situations can secure a role within a fortnight at upper end rates and have never had any gaps between roles.  I'm not as good as some of the BAs but I've only one break in contracts in over a decade so not doing too bad but I can tell in the first 2 minutes if its a no or a maybe... I know the type of hiring manager that likes my approach and I know those who want a more traditional person who I'll never convince that I can deliver for them (and similarly I will get declined for some roles because I appear "too senior" even though they're offering incomes in my normal range).

Clearly you have the work experience, and seemingly the technical knowledge, so maybe the weak link is your ability to sell yourself in an interview?