How to get a job as a data scientist with no relevant experience or education at all

This is obviously the hardest situation to be in but fear not, it is far from impossible.

Your first step is obviously to get your foot in the door, you can't be picky with salary and employers  but as soon you start to work your value will increase fast. Simply by doing something 8 hours a day you will soon become good at it.

The problem is therefore to get your foot in the door and that will be a little bit harder with no education or experience.

There are basically two ways to increase you marketability, getting some kind of education or learning things on your own.

I would only think about getting education if you fail at the steps below and in that case I would go for a shorter program.

Step 1. Decide on a reporting tool to learn

Your first job without any experience or education will be making reports for your boss or other people in the business. This is in general the first job for anyone starting out and a large part of any data scientist work unless you work only on a very specific problem.

It is also the one thing any data science organisation always want help in. In general the needs from management and other stakeholders are always bigger than what can be produced and data scientists in my experience would rather follow their own ideas than managements so any new hire that can take care of some of the dreaded management reporting is very welcome.

At the moment there are two tools I would care about, Tableu and Qlikview. That is because I think they are the coolest ones and any fun organization you want to work with have probably picked one of thoose two. I would not care to learn things like Business Objects unless you like wearing a suit and want to work as a consultant. I would neither care to learn stuff like R and SAS since these are best at making statistical analysis.

Step 2. Download it and learn it inside out

You are lucky that both theese two software packages has free versions. Download them and learn them inside out. Youtube is your friend.

Step 3. Learn some SQL

You do not need to be a master. Just enough to join some tables and do a GROUP BY.

Step 4. Make a good looking dashboard that connects to an SQL database

Here get as creative as you can. You want to make something you can show prospective employers. It could,

• Show a timeseries in some fancy way, preferably with a compared to last year or last month line.
• Have a table that shows both aggregates and daily and monthly results.
• Some kind of interactivity like the possibility to break down into subgroups
• and whatever you can come up with, the above are suggestions since it is something that comes up in almost all business reporting.

Come up with data if you can't find anything.

Step 5. Learn some Excel basics

I am talking vlookup() and pivot tables. Again youtube is your friend.

Step 6. Get this in front of employers

By now if you have showed this to an employer you will suddenly seem like a better value than the newly minted collage graduate that hasn't done any of these things before. While probably not an analytical superstar they will see that you can bring value from day one and that you are motivated, specifically, here is someone who can do this boring reporting for me while I do the stuff I find fun.

From there you can hopefully advance.