If you are working in another field, how can you transition to data analytics?
You may have a university degree in an unrelated field, or have been working in a completely different domain. You may be interested in transitioning into a data analysis role for a while, but do not know where to start. If this sounds like you, keep on reading! 😉
Essentially there are 2 ways to get into data analytics:
- (1) Completely self-taught: then cleverly combine analytics skills with your current domain knowledge either from your earlier study or jobs to gain competitive advantage;
- (2) Taking a data analytics degree or bootcamp.
In this blog post we will focus mostly on the self-taught route with the target of becoming a data analyst, which is a good starting point to a lot of other data science roles. This is also how I started 6 years ago, back then I was excited about healthcare analytics so this is the area I started out with.
In this article we will talk about what you should learn and prepare in terms of:
- Required skills
- Portfolio projects
- How to approach recruiters
Things are changing rapidly, with many concerns around the potential of AI to displace jobs and how that may affect you when pursuing data analytics. I will also share some insights on this at the end of this article.
You can also watch the video version of this blog post below 👇