Why You Shouldn't Build More Projects

If I had a pound for every aspiring Data Scientist who told me they need to ‘do more projects’ or ‘upskill’ I’d be a millionaire.

These are always the ones who are struggling to land any interviews and have applied for hundreds of jobs.

Whilst gaining experience through projects is a good idea if you don’t have professional Data Science experience,  most of these projects don’t help you get jobs.

It means you spend months wasting time, money and energy working on something with little end result.

My client Lodo had been looking for his first Data Science Job. He had done well to get interviews, but was being rejected a lot.

He thought he needed to work on more Kaggle projects in his spare time to get over the line. But when I went through his resume, he’d already done a good project, but he hadn’t turned it into a Tailored Project. Lucky for him, that didn’t take much work.

One interview later and he got his first Data Science Job!

Unrelated, I’d just been reading about the Pareto Principle. This explains that roughly 20% of the work done results in 80% of the results. This applies to lots of different things, like 20% of people holding 80% of wealth or 20% criminals committing 80% of crimes.

Anyway, Lodo’s success and the Pareto Principle made me realise that employers don’t care if you’ve done 2 projects or 20, they want to see 2-3 Tailored Projects from you so they’re convinced you can do the job.

If you have a huge project portfolio, employers are busy so will scan it for 2-3 Tailored Projects. Even if you did happen to have those, you’ve just wasted loads of time working on unnecessary projects, when you could have been enjoying your dream job and earning good money.

That’s what Lodo will soon be doing – he starts work this summer and is using his new salary to go to Portugal with his football team.

So don’t worry about building loads of projects – make sure you have 2/3 Tailored Projects.

I’m curious – what projects are you guys currently working on? Send me a reply and let me know!

God Bless and happy (bank holiday) Monday

Albert