How to land your first job as a data scientist

How can you get your first entry-level job as a data scientist or analyst? If you scroll through the data science subreddit, you will find many questions around this topic. Readers of my blog ask me the same from time to time, and I can tell you this is a totally valid problem.

I have decided to summarize my answers to all the major questions.

What are the most important data scientist skills and tools and how can you get them?

There’s good news and bad news.

I will start with the bad: 90 percent of the time, the skills they teach you at universities are not really useful in real-life data science projects. As I’ve written about several times, in real projects these four data coding skills are needed:

• Bash/command line
• Python
• SQL
• R
• And sometimes Java

Photo credit: KDnuggets.

It really depends on the company, which two or three they use, but if you’ve learned one, it will be much easier to learn another.

So the first big question is: how can you get these tools? Here comes the good news: all of these tools are free. It means that you can download, install, and use them without paying a single penny. You can practice, build a data pet project, or do anything. I wrote a step-by-step article recently on how to get and install these tools on your computer.

How do you learn the needed skills?

There are two major sources of learning data science easily and cost-efficiently. Don’t worry, neither of these involves attending US$1,000+ worth of conferences or workshops.

Books

Kind of old-school, but still a good way of learning. From books, you can get very focused, detailed knowledge about online data analysis, statistics, data coding, and other information. I highlighted seven books that I recommended in a previous article.

Top seven data books I recommend.

Online webinars and video courses

How can you practice and get real-life experience?

Where and how can you send your first job application?

Conclusion