Career Preparation Toolkit v1.1
Published by SuperDataScience Team
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Discover the 5 steps to Unlock your Career!
Ready to achieve your wildest data science career goals?
SDS put together an exclusive collection of articles, checklists, webinars, books, and other resources designed to complement the technical skills you are building with our courses, and succeed at every step of your job search.
Our Career Preparation Toolkit is constantly updated with new resources, and is an integral part of our new and improved Learning Paths. We’ll suggest what to do, and how to do it, in order to land (and crush) your next interview.
This page is constantly updated with new resources – check back periodically!
🏋🏻♀️ Practice your skills 🏋🏻♀️
A weekly challenge to flex your Tableau muscles and share your learnings with the online community.
A gallery with the best Tableau Public profiles to get inspired (and steal tips to create your own public profile)
Copying from spotlight authors on Tableau Public, participating in student challenges, and more: a few ways to get engaged with the Tableau community and build your portfolio.
A weekly social data project in R where users explore a new dataset each week and share their findings on Twitter with #TidyTuesday.
Datasets, notebooks, competitions to find inspiration, practice your skills, build your portfolio.
How to Contribute to Open Source Projects
A guide to get you started in the open source community, to build experience while creating real value and applying hard and soft skills.
A collaborative platform in which teams of people from all around the world join forces to solve nonprofit projects with AI and machine learning.
Platforms where you can publish your profile and pick up short-term gigs in data analysis, data cleaning, etc. to earn some money on the side and build your portfolio with real work.
🤝 Connect with the community 🤝
31 rules to follow when creating your LinkedIn account, suggested by job platform The Muse.
Mentorship and Networking in the Tech Industry
A lot of useful tips on using LinkedIn and the power of connecting with mentors for career development in this podcast (“Keys to a Woman’s Success in the Tech Industry” with Alana Karen at Google).
How to Make a Cold Connection on LinkedIn
Tips and templates to use the right words and connect to the right people on LinkedIn.
DataScienceGO LinkedIn Community
A place to connect with students and practitioners from the SuperDataScience community.
A list of influential people in data science to connect with and follow on social media. Others include: Cassie Kozyrkov, Eric Weber, Kirill Eremenko, Hadelin de Ponteves. Our tip? Don’t just connect, but study their profile, see what they posted on social media recently, and try to understand a little bit about their job. You could even ask for a quick 15-minute chat and prepare meaningful questions for them.
From identifying your audience to connecting meaningfully, a comprehensive guide on how to build a successful personal brand online.
Do You Have Time For A Quick Chat?
A simple etiquette for connecting with people and asking for advice and guidance (Another good tip? Make it super easy to schedule using Calendly and Zoom)
How to Build an Effective Mentor-Mentee Relationship
An article outlining useful frameworks and tips to develop a successful relationship with your professional mentor.(also here).
A comprehensive list of conferences, events, and meetups in data science. Also check the webinar section!
💼 Apply for jobs 💼
Identifying the right opportunity
Build a Career in Data Science
A talk by data scientist Emily Robinson (co-author of a book with the same name) with incredibly useful tips on how to land a job in data science (for example: how to connect meaningfully to potential mentors; what to expect from your first data science job depending on size and maturity level of the company you’re applying for).
Creating a Spreadsheet to Track Your Job Application Process
A useful Google Sheets template to make sure you follow a systematic and thorough approach to apply for new jobs. If you want to make it a bit smarter, use a Trello board!
Popular platforms for job searching. While building your personal brand, connecting to employees, and reaching out to recruiters may be a much faster way to get noticed, you can always use these platforms to search for jobs, study descriptions, understand titles and requirements, and research companies.
10 great job boards for data scientists
The big platforms are okay for job hunting. But they have lots of disadvantages, explained in this Twitter thread. Check out a list of 10 more focused, smaller job boards that you should absolutely consider when hunting for a position.
How To Analyze Job Descriptions
A few suggestions on how to critically look at a job posting. Mapping keywords, understanding requirements, researching buzzwords, and analyzing company profiles can help you gain confidence and familiarize with the process (especially if you remember a simple truth: you don’t need to match more than 60% of the requirements in order to be considered!).
Preparing your application
A simple and free resume template
Simple is best! A resume template you can copy and make your own.
Optimize your resume and cover letter to match the job description you are applying for, in order to maximize your chances of passing through the ATS (Applicant Tracking System 🤖) screening phase.
45 Quick Changes to Help Your Resume Stand Out
From common sense tips you may have missed out, to templates and best practices: this article is a compendium of all the smart rules you need to apply when creating your resume.
How to Build an Awesome Data Science Portfolio
Why does it make sense to create a data science portfolio? What does a star-quality portfolio look like? An intro from this article.
Building a Data Science Portfolio
Michael Galarnyk (also featured in our podcast) on why a portfolio is important to showcase your data science skills, how to use different platforms and media for different purposes, what type of projects it’s best to showcase, and more.
An introduction to the open source platform for absolute beginners in the tech field.
How to Setup a Free and Simple GitHub Portfolio
A step-by-step tutorial (also in a video version) by Ken Jee.
Creating the Perfect Cover Letter
A few tips on how to make your cover letter stand out from the crowd.
Preparing your interview
A 101-slide presentation with tons of tips on how to nail common interview questions and the type of mindset that you need to succeed in your job search.
Technical Interview Prep Newsletter
An email series with actionable tips and tricks on how to tackle common (and challenging) tech interview questions. While the second part of the series focuses on software development jobs, the first half has tips that data science applicants will find relatable as well.
A platform with practical simulations of popular coding questions and other tech interview challenges from top startups.
Practice coding skills on this web platform and get hired for your awesome code!
A list by Eric Weber with the 20 most common SQL queries and topics that come up during technical data science interviews.
A repository of common technical interview questions with tips and tricks. Also a newsletter with weekly questions “debugged”.
A platform for peer 2 peer interview practice. Similar to Mock Interviews, which also has a library of 300+ interview questions to practice with.
Another great website for interview preparation with questions and take-home exercises, focused on data science.
Negotiating
15 Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer
An article from Harvard Business Review with tips on the delicate negotiation phase of your job search.
How to choose between multiple offers
What if you’ve got options? It’s important you consider a variety of factors before you make a decision. Managing time and expectation can be quite challenging, but this article on Forbes has tips on how to succeed at it.
🔎 Keep up with data science 🔎
A directory of the best podcasts about data science (our own SuperDataScience podcast is featured as well!)
A weekly newsletter with the latest news and best picks in machine learning, data visualization, analytics, and strategy.
A weekly newsletter with news from the data science industry, latest applications and trends, and more.
A social initiative in which you devote at least 5 minutes of your day, for 66 consecutive days, to learning something in data science, and share your progress on Twitter, LinkedIn, or another social media.
💭 Reflect on yourself 💭
A seminal book in career development, applying the famous Business Model Canvas method to your own personal brand in order to understand who you are, what your value is, and how you can design your career that maximizes your potential.
Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show readers how to find a new job (or transform your present job!), and reshape your whole experience of work by utilizing the designer mindsets: curiosity, reframing. radical collaboration. awareness, bias to action, and storytelling.
Your career has 80,000 hours more or less. This website helps you focus on your identity, talents, and goals in order to find the ideal career path for you.
Do you have any resource to share, or feedback on our Toolkit?
Reach out at support@superdatascience.com!