Early in my working career, I worked as a graphic designer. Graphic designers take content that has been produced and manipulate and shape it into visual forms that will be appealing. Once the design has been created and approved, it must be properly prepared so that the information can be digitally transformed and produced using a combination of film, plating, color separation, and printing processes. Graphic design requires a combination of artistry, an eye for detail, technical knowledge, consistency, and language skills.
Work History
I worked also in the field of information technology (IT) technical support. IT technical support also requires communication and language skills, as well as knowledge of different types of technology, the ability to access systems to identify and document issues, and the ability to think about systems on a higher level, so that the source of the problem can be identified, and the correct resources can be allocated to resolve the challenge that the coworker is having. In many ways, the skill sets that work well for graphic design also work well in IT tech support, including an eye for detail, technical knowledge, consistency, systems thinking, and language skills.
Making a Change
After many years as the primary caretaker of a young family, I decided that I wanted to get back into the workforce. Things in IT have changed significantly in the seven years that I have been out of them. I started by taking courses in Computer Science, including various programming courses. Starting two years ago, I took foundational courses in information science, including programming courses in R and Python programming languages. I also took some required courses in statistics. I found the programming language and statistics courses to be fascinating, and I found that I enjoyed the challenges of working through problems systematically, be they statistical problems or programming problems. These tap into the systems thinking that I had developed earlier in my career as an IT Technical support.
Why Data Science?
As I started to learn the basics of data science, I came to understand that the programming languages and statistics that I was learning and enjoying were also a fundamental foundation for data science. As I was learning the basics of data science, I felt like I was on familiar turf in comparison with my old days in IT Technical support.
In IT tech support, coworker come to the IT support person and are asking for help with a problem. They may not know what is going on behind the scenes, but they know what is not working, and they know what they want the result to be. This is like the situation with a data scientist. The customer may come to a data scientist not fully understanding all of the details involved in analysis, big data, algorithms, programming, and all the tools needed to extract data insights, but the customer knows where they are now, and where they want to be.
As I see it, data science lets me build on the skills that I have been working on for most of my life. These skills are communication, attention to detail, systems thinking, identifying and documenting issues, and coming up with creative solutions. Because I have enjoyed these aspects of my work life up until now, I have no reason to think that as I apply these skill areas to the field of data science that I will find it any less enjoyable.
