What happens after you get the so-called sexiest job of the 21st century? Data scientist positions are very different from one organization to another but, regardless, you can ensure a varied and exciting career in this role. But there is more to it than stepping into a team lead or expert role. data science skills are easily reusable and data scientists who leave their specific role aren’t necessarily leaving the data science and AI field. In companies such as Dataiku, where building the future of AI is the ultimate goal for all, data scientists can even take advantage of multiple lateral opportunities to grow their career.
Let’s hear it from Dataikers who experienced such moves! This week, we met with Ned, Lorena, and Samuel who started their career at Dataiku as data scientists before moving internally to some other exciting roles. Learn more about their career transitions, what drove them to make a change, and how their data science experience helps them thrive in their new roles.
“I started looking into data science while still working with nonprofit organizations. I had been part of multiple monitor and evaluation and research and evaluation teams and knew that we could be doing so much more with the data we had on the population we were servicing besides just descriptive analytics. So I started teaching myself how to code and pretty soon realized that I wanted to dive into the field.
As part of Dataiku’s data science team, what I enjoyed the most was to be able to meet with very experienced data scientists and help them start their Dataiku journey. My internal move towards a sales engineer role felt quite natural as, while still on the data science team, I would at times be asked to support pre-sales activities (i.e., a demo, a workshop, etc.) with prospects in LATAM who spoke Spanish.
With time, I started getting curious about the sales engineering role and spoke to a number of sales engineers who helped me understand the role in its entirety, including some sales engineers that had joined Dataiku as data scientists and had afterwards transitioned to the sales engineer role. This transition is indeed pretty common here and I can now see exactly why. As ex-data scientists, we can speak from the user perspective. Prospects and clients really appreciate when you can put yourself in their shoes and create an image of how things could work differently.”
“I have a quantitative background and I have always been interested in using this knowledge to solve real-world problems. I learned a ton being a data scientist as I was working on a large spectrum of projects with very passionate colleagues.
