Getting back to work after a career gap or transitioning into a new career can be difficult. Read further to learn how Archana was able to explore new areas of work and her journey with Great Learning’s PGP Data Science and Business Analytics Course in her own words.
I am Archana from Kerala. I have been settled in Bangalore for 15 years. Married and mom of a nine-year-old girl. I have been interested in tech since I started my career with Fidelity Investments in 2007. I have been handling different roles related to data.
I am currently on a career break since 2019. I find it a little difficult to return to the workplace if you have long years of experience in the industry. Basically, I faced issues as I am trying to switch into the Analytics field as it was not a space where I have industry experience. But I think it may not be that difficult if you have a lesser number of years of experience in the industry.
I had also faced certain challenges when I did return to work after the maternity break. I was handling the Production support role during that time, and it was very difficult handling the night shift and as it was a highly critical application, and work from home was not allowed. As the company encourages internal moves within teams, I took a different role that suited my interests and opened up new opportunities in my career.
I have been handling various data analysts/data handling roles in my organization. So there were many scenarios in my organization where we felt like a team if we could take a step ahead to use the data efficiently for future use and to build better processes. I also attended a few Data science role interviews within the organization. But that is when I felt there is a need to upskill myself in the Data science space as I was inclined more towards data and was interested in deriving relevant insights out of it. I wanted to explore more in this space and also because of the wide opportunities it has in the industry, irrespective of the domain.
I believe many women are unaware of the interesting Data science opportunities out there in the industry. Basically, organizations can organize webinars or other sessions where it should explain how interested the data science field is and how people can transition into this space. Another main point is to make them aware of how the domain they have expertise in really makes a difference to be a better data scientist and also on how the tools (for modeling etc.) help in case they are basically not from a coding background.
I would suggest aspiring data scientists try out a few online courses to get the basics of Data Science. Understand different Data science roles available in the industry. Enroll in good Data science courses, which would open up many exciting opportunities.
I got great feedback from Great Lakes Alumni when I was actually looking to enroll in a Data Science course. Great Lakes is a great institution, which has great professors /instructors who have a lot of industry experience in the Data Science field. This helps the students a lot and really helps them to get a great hold on the subject.
Initially, I was hesitant about transitioning into this field as I was not from a coding background, and I felt it necessary to take up a data science role. But during the course, I realized that it is not very hard to pick up things and also learned about different roles I can choose even if I don’t want to go deep into coding /statistics. The course was very helpful in upskilling and making me ready to explore more in the field.
