126: You’ll Never Land a Data Job If You Do This

welcome to the Data Career Podcast the podcast that helps aspiring data professionals land their next data job here's your host Avery Smith

There's one thing that will kill a data career pivot faster than anything else. And it's not running out of money, not being smart enough or losing a job to AI. None of these. It's losing momentum. And I know, I know it sounds a bit basic, but I promise you it's very true because think about it. When you started your data career journey, correct me if I'm wrong, but you were bright eyed, you were bushy tailed, you were super excited, and you were motivated to learn. But as you continued in your journey. Something may have happened where you kind of lose your momentum or you lose your magic the thing that you were so excited about and Maybe you're mad or bitter even but the process isn't the same anymore and you've lost your momentum. Tell me, if this sounds familiar, you spent the last three weeks learning sequel, and then you got distracted. Maybe there was a wedding you had to go to, or maybe you got sick and you took a week off, maybe two weeks off. And you come back two weeks later, sit at the keyboard, ready to code some sequel and you forgotten pretty much everything that you learned. So what do we do? Well, if you're new here, hello, my name is Avery Smith and I'm a senior data analyst and career coach. And I've literally watched hundreds of aspiring data analysts lose their momentum, but it's a hundred percent preventable. It just takes a little bit of work. I like to employ two rules to try to keep momentum up. Those two rules are number one, learn in community and number two refuse to stop. So let's get into it. All right here. So many aspiring analysts try to learn data analytics and make their data career pivot on their own. And I totally get it because that's what I tried to do when I was breaking a data analytics, I tried to do it by myself. I tried to do the YouTube, the blogs, the websites, the books, and just me. But there's a big problem when you try to break into data on your own. In fact, there's three big ones. You're more likely to one, lose motivation and give up. Two, go down the wrong learning track and waste time, and three, miss out on key networking opportunities. And to illustrate this point, I want to tell you a quick story. So I live in Utah and I recently hiked Mount Tipenogos to watch the sunrise. It is this awesome, beautiful, tall mountain, and it usually takes me about eight hours to do this hike. So I actually got to the trailhead at 3am so I could catch the 7am sunrise. And like many of you are doing with your data career journey, I chose to do this adventure solo. And you guys, it was pitch black. Like it was so dark. And when I arrived at the trailhead, it was super hard to even see the signs and even to see the trail and the markings. And to make matters worse, I was hiking and about one mile in, I see something up in the distance. And I'm like, what is that? And I'm already freaked out, right? It's just a deer, not a big deal, but the glowing eyes were there and it was staring at me. I was like, Oh, that was kind of scary. but then I got about a half mile later and someone actually left a note and the note read bear spotted, beware. And you guys, I'm like freaking out. I'm terrified. I honestly felt like just turning around right there and giving up and being like, Nope, this hike is not for me. In this moment. I was by myself. And so I was freaked out. Had I had friends, I maybe wouldn't have been as scared and they possibly could have encouraged me and be like, Oh, it's fine. You have pepper spray. You have bear spray. You'll be all right. And we're all together in a group. We're kind of noisy. So we'll scare off any bears, right? Uh, that was not the case. I was by myself and I was just in my head. And this will be true in your data journey as well. When you face your bear of discouragement or failure, you're going to want to have friends there to lift you back up Dusty off and help you brave the danger. Uh, I know if I would have turned around, I actually would have been super mad at myself as well, which is one of the things that friends and community gives you is the ability is they can hold you accountable to what you actually want to do, right? I didn't want to complete the hike, but I let my feelings and my emotions. Kind of get the best of me in that situation so you want to be learning in community. You don't want to do this by yourself. Despite how scary the bear was, I decided to do the hike and keep going. A few miles down the trail. I started to feel like, man, this looks a little different. Maybe I'm not going the right way. Nah, you're going the right way. I was kind of in my head. Um, but I kept going until I saw the next trail marker and sure enough, I had taken a wrong turn in the darkness of the night. I couldn't really see where I was supposed to turn and I honestly had to hike back 25 minutes. So that wrong turn, not being able to see the sign wasted almost an hour of time that I had when I was trying to catch that sunrise. And had I been in community, had I had friends with me, maybe one of them would have seen the trail marker that I missed and been like, Hey, we need to go here. Don't go there. Right? Friends on your data journey will do the exact same thing. They'll make sure you're studying and doing, taking action on the right things that's going to lead in the direction of landing a day to job. It's not just you kind of guessing, you get to decide with your friends and kind of workshop and brainstorm with them of like, Oh, is this working for you? Oh, it's working for me. Maybe I'll try that. So on and so forth. Despite all this mess, I eventually made it to the top of the mountain and it was beautiful. But I missed the sunrise by 45 minutes. It was still amazing, but I honestly wish I had done it with friends. Not only because the wrong turn, not only because the scariness of the bear, I never saw the bear by the way, but I wish I'd done the hike to create and foster and build more relationships. It just would have been more fun to do in community. And once again, this is true in your data journey, because it's just more fun when you're learning together, you can learn faster and you can learn more efficiently and also it's really important to be in community because you'll have more opportunities because you'll be part of a larger network. You're part of their network, right? The network effect, right? And you know, the 80 20 rule of the job hunt says that 80 percent of job offers come from either being recruited or referred, which is really all a form of networking. So you want to be learning and job hunting in community to get that effect. All of this to say, you keep your momentum when you're in community. There's lots of opportunities to be in community in the data community. There's master's degrees, there's boot camps, there's free discords, wherever you can find community that you vibe with, go for it. If you're not sure where, please check out the Data Analytics Accelerator. I'll have a link to it in the show notes down below. It is an awesome group of aspiring analysts that I personally coach and help them on their data journey. We're in a big community all together and we help each other every day. Check it out in the show notes. All right, let's talk about rule number two, which is refusing to stop. And one of the easiest ways to keep momentum is simply to refuse to stop. That's it. I know it sounds simple. Once again, that's the only thing that you cannot do. Stop. Everything else allowed. Stopping. No. Even if that means you're only doing one teeny tiny thing every day, you're at least doing something. I recently asked Zach Wilson, the million dollar data engineer, what he chalks up all of his success to, and here's what he said. Consistency, showing up, writing one line of code every day, even when I'm sad or when I'm tired. You guys, Zach made over 550, 000 as a data engineer. He made it, and what he says his success was because? Consistency, doing something small every day. You need to show up every day in your data journey, even if it's just one line of code. Earlier this year, I actually completed my first Ironman 70. 3 race, which if you're unfamiliar is a 1. 2 mile swim, a 56 mile bike ride and a 13. 1 mile run. And as you can imagine, that is not an easy race and it was very difficult for me. At about mile 50 on the bike, we hit the biggest hill of the race. It honestly felt straight up and I was already quite depleted. Cycling, especially uphill, is one of my weaker areas, and the exhaustion of the swim and the first 50 miles of the bike was really draining my energy. I watched biker after biker break down on the side of the road due to dehydration, cramps, or straight up exhaustion. They were so tired and so was I. And honestly, that was really tempting to just do what they do. Pull to the side of the road, hop off the bike. Even if it was just for a second, right? Because I was exhausted. My foot was crushed in my cycling shoe. My butt was numb from three hours of straight bike saddle. And I could barely keep my legs moving on that steep incline. As I was doing so, I felt the embarrassment and honestly kind of ashamed because I was getting passed left and right by other bikers. I had lost all of my lead, all of my time, and I was barely moving up this hill. And I thought, Oh, what will three minutes on the side of the road do to my time? Nothing. But I told myself I cannot stop pedaling no matter what. I refuse to stop because I knew that if I got off that bike, even if it was for three minutes in my head, it would be longer than three minutes. I'd also lose momentum and getting back on the bike and going up the hill would be near impossible. You cannot get off your data bike. Even if it's just one day, be like Zach and get one small task done every day, no matter how small it is. It could be something as simple as reading a data article, writing one line of code, making a data viz, reading one page of a data book, apply to one data job, sending one cold message, listening to a data podcast or YouTube video like this one, All of these tasks are something that you can do even if you have a big work day or you have a family function or you're tired or you're sick. In fact, that actually leads to one of the biggest momentum killers, which is actually something you wouldn't think about, but it's interviews. Interviews are actually one of the biggest momentum killers because people get interviews and they really cram for the interviews. And I totally get that and I understand that. But they almost do so much cramming that they forget where they were in their process, in their journey, what they were studying, what they had just learned, and they have a hard time getting back into it. Or they might have stopped applying for jobs altogether just because they landed this one interview. And the problem with that is the interview process might be two to three weeks. And that's two to three weeks that you might not be applying to any jobs, and you're in the groove right now. When you land the interview, you got to keep applying and almost pretend that you didn't get the interview because no interview ever leads to a job 100 percent of the time. There's always a chance that you're not going to land it and when that rejection letter comes, you're going to be really sad and you're going to be even sadder if you haven't been applying for any jobs and you have in the pipeline. So my challenge to you is to just do one small thing every day. Just choose one, do it today, do it tomorrow, do it the next day, and over and over again.