My Skills & Value

I strongly believe my skills line up perfectly for the 21st century. The worst part (from a job hunting perspective) is how to display my attributes to potential employers. As a result, I will use this blog to show my thought processes, creativity, and critical thinking/data analysis abilities.

As I said in my intro, numbers/data analytics is ultimately my strong suit. I absolutely love looking at numbers and interpreting them, and cannot get enough data. In a perfect world, I could work with the largest brands to look at their data, solve problems, and ultimately create new solutions that provide value to the brand. 

One job description I have been pursuing is a data scientist. Relatively new, this job has plenty of opportunity in the upcoming world. Unfortunately, one of the largest requirements, programming experience, is one I do not have. BUT, I have been told that it is not a deal breaker if I do not have this experience. So what do I have to offer? This article (http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/predicted-to-perform-how-to-hire-analytic-talent/) explains it well. Specifically, 

• They have a cognitive “attitude” and will search for deeper knowledge about everything.
• They are driven to be creative and will want to create not only solutions, but also elegant solutions.
• They have a strong desire to “do things the right way,” and will encourage others to do the same.
• They have an extremely high sense of quality, standards, and detail orientation, often evaluating others by these same traits.
• They tend to be somewhat restrained and reticent in showing emotions, and may be less verbal at team or organizational meetings unless asked for input or if the topic is one of high importance from their perspective.
• They may take calculated, educated risks — only after a thoughtful analysis of facts, data, and potential outcomes. They persuade others on the team by careful attention to detail, and through facts, data, and logic, not emotion.

This is exactly the type of characteristics employers are looking for, and exactly the type of strengths I possess. Since I don’t have this programming experience that is so prevalent in data science job requirements, I need to (and can) make it up in other areas. I feel like one of the main reasons I haven’t been looked at in the data science field is because the recruiters do not know how to extract raw talents like the ones listed above and instead are focusing on established credentials (ie programming languages) which is fundamentally wrong. One blog post I will go in depth on is the new age of recruiting (i.e. not only sending in resumes like so many companies do).