Introducing Occam's Data
The data career path is backwards. The process looks like this:
Identify important data skills.
Learn those skills through courses, blogs, and bootcamps.
List the new skills on a resume.
Wait for resume to catch recruiter’s attention.
Understand the data role from “experience”.
We learn data skills before we understand why we need them. This is because it’s difficult to explain to someone who’s never worked with data.
We shouldn’t need work experience to understand the data profession. We just need a simpler way to explain it.
Never increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.
William of Ockham
A New Way to Communicate
The language of data is too complicated. We can make the data profession easier to understand. We just need to simplify it. Each post in this blog will explain a simpler way to think about the data profession.
This simpler explanation of data will make it easier to understand. It will make the data career path more clear. It will make data easier for people to learn.
A Data Blog For Everyone
There are no prerequisites for this blog. Anyone from your CTO to your grandma should be able to understand the content of this blog. I want all of my readers to understand what data is and what we use it for.
Your First Exercise
Each post will include an exercise at the end. You must subscribe to the blog to send me your response. Simply reply to the posts with your response via email. For this introductory exercise, reply to your welcome email.
These exercises will encourage readers to practice the subject of the post. I will respond to every submission within 72 hours. I just request you keep your submission to a short paragraph. I look forward to reading your answer.
Prompt: Describe to a 5 year old what a data professional does in one sentence.
This is not easy. That said, we can explain to a 5 year old what a doctor does. Why can’t we do the same for the data profession?
Your answer can apply to a specific role (e.g. data engineer, data analyst). Or it can be more broad.
If you can’t keep it to one sentence, try two.
If you think 5 years old is too young, try 21.
Start with an answer, then see if you can make it simpler.
Thank you for reading! Please subscribe if you want to read more. And please share with anyone you think would enjoy.