5 Rules of getting a job in data science

This is inspired by Jordan Peterson's practical advice book "12 rules for life"

First - Know the rules

Understand the profile and get your keywords right. The search engine uses cosine distance on TF-IDF kind of scheme. JD-CV keyword overlap is extremely crucial.

Having rare keywords will get a higher weightage to your resume because IDF value will be high. (The actual scheme is most probably BM25 which is a modified version of TF-IDF.)

How do I know all this stuff?

I have worked and talked with people who do data science in HR.

As a fresher I had to do resume rewriting and keyword gaming so that I would get shortlisted. It's a tough game and you need to do whatever it takes. (Don't fake anything. It can spoil reputation forever.)

Nowadays I do the reverse - Shortlist jobs as per my goal.

Second - Hard truth

If your resume is already the best you can have, you applied for 100 jobs and you still didn't get interview, just leave job application on the side.

This means that your profile is not yet ready or isn't above average. Swallow the hard truth.

Job application can look like a 5-minute button click activity but god knows how much time it can consume. So just stop wasting time.

Third - You and your courses

There is a flood of courses - free and paid.

Most of the time, the quality of course is inversely proportional to its price. This also means that a free course has infinite quality - it's actually true.

The price of some courses isn't high because they are of high quality. Its because a lot of their money goes into advertising and failure to do economies of scale.

Default to Coursera. Audit a course if you have no money and find the course assignments on GitHub.

My favorite nowadays is YouTube.

Fourth - Certificate validation game

I have been working in AI for a few years and it struck me one day that nobody ever asked me for my certificates. Seems, the industrial value of my certifications is zero.

Rather than chasing certificates, find your USP(Unique selling point) or the Ahaa factor - someone should look at your profile and get immediate Ahaa to hire you.

I leave this to you to define your own way to raise your USP.

Think…

What am I supplying

that no one else can supply?

Fifth - Inner fears

Every moment you spend reading How to get in data science? you are just wasting time.

Stop spending time reading articles like this.

This is what we call procrastination.

There is a high chance that you already know enough.

Start writing code. Be consistent. Show up every day.