Am I on the right track? - A LinkedIn Data Story
Data can unravel many a secrets?: All you need to do is?look.
I am a firm believer that Data can really help uncover a lot of mysteries. This same belief has made people query their Data, trying to find value. This same value made Data Science the sexiest job of the century.
However people soon realized, they needed to improve the quality of their data before trying to make sense of it. Hence the recent trend for Data Engineer hiring.
Now once the Data Engineers, provide you good quality data you still need to wait till the Data Scientists can actually build a model to automate value delivery. However during this time the role of a Data Analyst becomes paramount.
This is the phase where an analyst can help you make sense of the data and to give you insights on how different parameters are performing.
For a Data Analyst its important that he can articulate the findings in a crisp manner. Then only the leadership will be able o take proper decisions. For small businesses that is the way to track and measure progress.
I used the same principles to understand how my content was doing. In the last 2-3 months I have tried to consistently write about my experiences as a Data Engineer. I have also created content to help early stage professionals and students to migrate into Data Engineering.
When LinkedIn announced the new analytics features, that gave a great way to easily analyze my performance on LinkedIn. I can use the results to investigate, understand what is working and what is not.
This article will take you through the same analytics and along the way will try to identify the stories that they tell, the insights that they help to unravel.
How to find ideas to write?
I ran a poll to understand the challenges people face when starting out as a Data Engineer. The results were really revealing. Benjamin Rogojan ran a similar poll on Youtube. The results were similar.
As you can in the poll above majority of the people had faced challenges to have a clear roadmap no how to learn and how to become a Data Engineer. This was a clear gap that needed addressing. Its not that there were roadmaps missing on the internet, but still many people felt that way.
Hence I created a concise yet comprehensive roadmap and a study plan. As this addressed a real pain area, the post along with the roadmap really went viral. It has already reached more than 500,000 people only on LinkedIn and even more on other platforms.
Solve a problem and it will become popular:
Look at the peak, which tells how the impression increased suddenly. Since, the post I mentioned above solved a genuine problem, it connected with a lot of people.
Never Loose Focus:
A viral post is not created in a day. People notice you for that one success, but its the effort that you spend for years to prepare that matters. You will have years gone by with no results, but that will teach you the things you need to finally achieve success.
If we do not persist, success will never come. See the results above, it was almost flat for the whole year but it ultimately resulted in the huge peak.
Now let's explore whether I am achieving the targets in terms of audience. I wanted to reach the below sets of people through my posts:
So, let's check the demographics of my audience.
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44% are entry level professional. 34% are senior.
54% are from IT
13% are from Computer software
12% are Data Engineers
9% are Software Engineers ( aspiring DE?)
The 3 visualizations are great examples to confirm that I am probably on the right track and my content is reaching the right set of audiences.
Now by now, you might have been bored of hearing about my writings and my posts only. However I would like to decipher a great example how Data can lead to amazing discoveries, serendipity at best.
The India Story & The Bangalore Story:
I am writing from Kolkata, majority of my connections too are supposed to be from Kolkata ( Its changing with time ) . However when I checked the above bar chart of the locations of my audience I was taken aback. Majority of them were coming from Bengaluru.
This was even true for individual posts, and even the most popular one had most people visiting from Bengaluru.
This probably tells you a story how Bengaluru has left behind all the other major metros in terms of growth of different startups and also bigger companies setting shop.
So, to conclude the analytics data of my LinkedIn posts not only tell me that I am on the right track. Probably the data also tell me that Bengaluru to be specific and India in a broader sense are also on the right track to grow.
The foundations have already been built and we can now only shoot for the stars. I am sure the next decade will belong to India again, as we will see a lot of growth. Bengaluru will certainly be on the driver's seat in the rampage.
If you would like to read more such Data Stories, do consider subscribing to the newsletter. If you are a student looking to start your career as a Data Engineer or Junior/senior professional looking to improve on the craft of Data Engineering and discuss different aspects of it follow me on LinkedIn or on Medium here and if you want you can download the free Data Engineering Roadmap study plan. Its free, yet if you want you can buy me a coffee while downloading.