Making a Career Transition - Big Bank to Big Data

“If I can make a teacher’s salary doing comedy, I think that’s better than being a teacher.” - Dave Chappelle

People like Warren Buffett, Kobe Bryant, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Dave Chappelle knew exactly what they wanted to do at a young age and earned a fair advantage over their peers by simply having more practice. For the rest of the world, we figure out our professional calling a bit later in life and use the skills that we built up until that point to transfer over to something new. This moment can happen at 20, 35, or even 50. Often times, we warp our perceptions of self-identity into who we are at work when there’s a lot more to a person than their 9-5 hustle. Only when we dig into the person underneath the job title is it easy to see how a career transition is possible. Hard work, patience, empathy, perseverance, and curiosity are all traits that carry over to success in any line of work.

I’m a firm believer that people do their best work when they’re tasked with problems that are important to them and they’re excited about solving. If you don’t feel that way about the work you do now, I think that it’s our duty as humans to continue searching until you find the perfect professional space. I transitioned from the business world to the world of data science and analytics in my early-mid 20s. The goal of this post is to not only help those who are interested in my particular industry but to also provide a framework that I believe will work regardless of what your ideal career-path is. This post isn’t for those who need to follow a certain educational path to legally perform their job (lawyers, doctors, etc.); it’s for all the jobs out there where it’s possible to be self-taught and succeed.

My Story

I work on the data science and analytics team at a distributed cloud storage startup. The place that I work and the title that I have couldn’t have existed 100 years ago. I can do the work that I do because of the explosion in computer hardware and software over decades that allows us to create data-intensive applications where making decisions based on data makes perfect sense. My career is the result of a bunch of things conspiring to create a world where analyzing digital data is a thing. But I didn’t start here. I transitioned.

In college, I was a Business Administration major with a concentration in Finance. I took extra classes in mathematics and was one class away from getting a minor in the subject. I worked as a math tutor for a couple of years. My first summer internship was in a rotational program at a bulge-bracket bank where I spent half the summer in sales and trading and the other half in investment banking. The next summer, I went on to work at the same bank in the investment banking division. Around half-way through the internship, I was positive that I didn’t want the job. The money was great, but the hours were rough and I saw how the job took a toll on the full-timers around me. Then, the best thing happened to me. I didn’t get the return offer. They put me on “hold” and tried to find roles for me in different groups and divisions at the bank. I passed. I knew it wasn’t my calling.

Following that summer, I had to figure out life. I had no job lined up and it felt like just about all my peers were set up with their full-time jobs. I applied to one program and one program only. Venture for America - an entrepreneurship fellowship program. It turned out to be a great decision and being a part of the fellowship led me to my first job. My main role was as a Program Manager for an accelerator program. I helped put together events, coordinated meetings between company founders and mentors, and created written content for the cohort. I didn’t really like being a program manager and the work culture didn’t fit my personality. Within a year, I was 22 and unemployed. Perfect.

I remember sitting in my room a few days after being let go and thinking “what’s next”. After putting some thought into it, I knew that I either wanted to start a company or work for a company that I felt was on the cutting-edge of technology. With that vision in mind, I also decided to teach myself how to code. If I was going to create a tech company one day, I wanted to at least know what was going on with the product side. About a year and a few months passed before I earned my role as a data analyst at Storj Labs. Between that time, I worked part-time with my sister-in-law on her web design business. It was the most stressful time in my life. I didn’t have much money, I had to teach myself how to close sales (much harder than I thought), and I still had to keep my eyes on the vision I made in my head a few days after being let go.

But here I am. I put my head down and made it through. I’ve been working in my role for a year and some change and learning how to code was worth it. That starting point led me to what I loved - data science and analytics. It was a nice connection between the topics I covered as a math tutor and computer science. I found the work that I consider compelling. I want to dedicate the rest of this post to break down a framework that got me there. I’ll include resources for those interested in data science and analytics and also keep things general enough for anybody to take this framework and run with it. Whether it’s acting, writing, real estate, etc. Here we go.

The Basics

Have a schedule

Having a schedule is crucial whenever you’re trying to learn a new skill. When I was transitioning into data science and analytics, I’d wake up at 5 am on weekdays and start my morning off with 3-4 hours of practice. I’m a morning person. Maybe you want to use your time after work to get a few hours in. It doesn’t matter how you break up the time; what matters most is that you’re putting away some time to work on your goal.

Sacrifice

If you look at my schedule, you’ll notice that I could have used those morning hours to get more sleep. If you look a bit deeper, you’ll also notice how hard it would be to stay up past midnight and wake up at 5 am on a consistent basis. So, I go to sleep before 11pm most of the time to make sure I can wake up at 5 am with enough rest to get my morning work done and still perform at my day job. Maybe you have to cut out going out on the weekdays or watching more than one episode of your Netflix show. Whatever you have to drop to get to your goal, just do it.

Consistency and Perseverance

We’ve all had that moment in time where we were super pumped about a new goal and hit the ground running. Fast-forward a month later and you’ve completely let go of your goal. You stopped putting in the work. The key to making the career transition is consistency. It took a year and a few months of self-teaching until I got my breakthrough job. You have to be willing to continue to learn until you get that perfect opportunity.

Analyze - Track your goals

Setting goals is a huge contributor to success. It helps make a vision tangible. Something that helped me was using project management tools like Asana and Trello to set larger goals and break them down into subtasks. Breaking down goals into bite-sized tasks forces you to get intimate with exactly what you need to do to get from point A to point B. The more that you set goals, the better you get at setting them. The key is to track your goals and hold yourself accountable when you don’t reach a goal on the timeline that you expected. And when you realize that certain goals no longer make sense, be flexible enough to switch it up.

The Framework That Worked for Me

Exposure

Before you step into a complete career change, you want to know that you’re spending your time learning something that’s worthwhile. Read the “day in the life” articles, find relevant blogs within the space, reach out to someone within the field, and check out a podcast or two. The exposure step is to make sure that you’re genuinely interested in transitioning into that particular industry. If you find yourself nodding off during the exposure phase, then maybe that field isn’t your calling. You should be captivated during the exposure phase and motivated to get an introduction into what it means to work in that space.

Introduction

This is where the real work begins. You can only read blogs and watch videos for so long. You have to get familiar with what goes into working in your targeted industry. In today’s world, there’s a book, YouTube video, or online course for everything. Research best beginner resources and courses for your targeted career and pick a set of resources that make the most sense. If you’re looking to become an actor or actress, maybe that means taking a local acting class and watching acting tips on YouTube to supplement the class.

In my case, the introduction meant getting a clear understanding of the basics of computer science. Without that foundation, you can’t use data to deliver value. It’s important to know the basic programming concepts and how they apply to data science and analytics. I took an introductory computer science class called CS50 by Harvard. It took me around six months to get through a semester of material while maintaining performance at my job. Although I didn’t understand everything during that class, it gave me the exposure to take those basic skills and apply them to data science and analytics. From there, I learned Python (one of the standard languages for data science and analytics) and went from there.

Learn the common paths and craft your own path

How have the people before you done it? Did they have to go to graduate school? Did they have to take official coursework or go to a educational boot camp? Which of those paths best fit your learning style and how does that path tie in with the fastest and most efficient path from point A to point B? Do your research.

In my case, I realized that I could become a data scientist without going to school for computer science or statistics, or getting a Ph.D. I saw how many free online resources there were and that if I used them to my advantage, I could break into the industry without going back to graduate school and get paid to learn everything I need to on the job. But in turn, I had to organize my learning schedule and do a lot of networking that a graduate school or bootcamp provides for you. A bootcamp or nanodegree program also might have provided a slightly faster route. Know yourself and know what path works best.

More practice

Now you have an introduction to the field and have a good sense of what it takes to break into the industry. It’s time to practice more! Repetition works! Do projects, set up a portfolio. Create a blog showcasing your knowledge. Show people that you’re serious about your craft. People invest in people and not pieces of paper. If you can showcase your progress via projects, you may be able to beat out people with more traditional backgrounds in an interview process.

Networking

It doesn’t matter what work you’ve done on the front-end if nobody knows that you’ve been working. Go to networking events. Scour the internet for emails. Create a list of people you want to connect with. The goal of this exercise is to showcase your progress, gain allies, and start developing leads for opportunities. You’d be surprised how many people are willing to help. Just ask for 15 minutes or their time and be prepared to sell yourself and learn more. In many cases, your job will come from a person that you built a strong relationship with.

Mentorship

This is probably the most impactful part of the whole equation. When you’re learning something new, having a mentor is invaluable. At my current job, having a few employees that I can always go to with questions has helped me tremendously. Through your networking, you should be able to find a solid mentor. Ask intentional questions, don’t be afraid to ask the dumb ones, and ask often. People gain knowledge to use it. So let them use it to get you closer to your goals. And when you become an expert, pay it forward.

Breakthrough

You have a mentor and a strong network. At this point, either your mentor will have an opportunity for you or somebody in your network will. It’s just a matter of being patient. This is the stage that’s often frustrating. It may be filled with no’s and maybe later’s and ignores. But if you remain consistent, your network will come through clutch. Eventually, you have a breakthrough and it changes everything. My breakthrough was my job at Storj. It took around 4 months of conversation until the right job opened. I got the opportunity on the spot. My mentor looked out. He was the person who I’d built the strongest relationship with after reaching out to people for months!

Taking the opportunity and running with it

You got the breakthrough role. How do you make the person who vouched for you proud? You put in the work and you take things to the next level. You study more and push to work on more challenging tasks. You use that chip on your shoulder to get things done at a high level and impress your peers. Once I got my job as a data analyst, I kept waking up at 5 am to get in the extra work. I needed for programming practice and needed to learn about a billion other things. Perks of an interdisciplinary job. Linear Algebra, Statistics, and Calculus were important. So were the skills of working with databases, cleaning and exploring data, and creating quality visualizations. After that, the next step was learning the core machine learning concepts that come along with the role of the data scientist title. I’m still on that path now. And I’m working towards that promotion each and every day. Whatever the role is, think about the next goal. Reach high and set up a plan to get there. Get allies to help you along the way.

Hopefully, this was helpful. Did you make a job transition? Tell me your story in the comments below. Are you in the midst of a transition? Tell me about it. If you liked this post, let me know!

Written on March 4, 2019