What motivated the career change?
I once worked in the product area of an Edtech company where my job was to manage everything related to the Data Analytics and Data Science classes. In that role, my work was much more operational than technical, but I attended some meetings where I could listen to the technical discussions of the people making decisions about the courses. I remember one of the discussions was "Should we include Google Colab in the tools we use?", and I also remember being explained (very patiently) what Colab is and what it is for. That professional experience, with those people, showed me how vast the data universe is and how there is always more to learn. I also noticed how the community helps each other, and how that helps me to learn and help others while they help me.
That was the beginning. Later, I began to notice my own behavior: I liked solving technical problems, they were interesting challenges for me.
This is where the difficulty lies:
Well, for some people, it can be very easy to change career like this, or make any other important life decision. But I always needed to reflect a lot before taking a bolder step that would have a big impact on my life and routine. I always wanted to know very well what I was doing and why. That said, in my case, the career transition process was above all a process of self-knowledge. I needed many steps to understand if this was what I really wanted. And during those steps, I realized that there was a serious risk of me taking several disordered actions to try to reach my goal. And seriously, nothing in the world scares me more than mess, feeling disorganized and doing things in a disorderly way (yes, I'm the crazy organized one, lol).
So, I decided to sort and organize! Because it was not enough for me to know the basic concepts and just start studying. I knew that I should take a SQL course, but I wanted to know which course, with the teaching style that I would fit best and thus be able to take the greatest advantage and obtain the most assertive results in my learning. I needed a strategy. I have always been quite ambitious about my goals. I have always hated doing something mediocre, and in this case, I wanted to do the best, especially for myself.
Curating content: where the magic happens!
I started my planning by actively searching for content and also following and connecting with people who talked about data. I joined every group and community about data, on the most diverse channels. I gathered so much content that I didn't even know where to store it anymore. So I started documenting everything in Notion, but again it wasn't enough. I wanted Notion to serve only as a notebook, and I wanted to make a kind of mind map so that my planning would be more visual, and I could spend less energy looking for the desired information. So, I used Miro as a board to draw my roadmap (I could have done it on my wall with post-its, but I want to be a digital nomad, so it was much more sensible to do it using technology).
In the figure below, I present my strategic career planning.
A place for everything and everything in its place
At some point in my search for material, I acquired a large amount of free content and it was all mixed up between the most diverse subjects, there was Tableau, Power BI, Cloud, Python... Using Miro to my advantage, I created several stages, ordered and organized, each one with its own subject (remember I said I was the crazy organized one? that's right).
I've sorted the materials based on what was required for each professional in the market. For example: I knew that Cloud knowledge is usually not a very common job requirement for data analysts, but rather for engineers. So I noticed that I was creating learning "paths". Wow, at that moment I was so happy! I was able to replicate on my own what many courses and bootcamps do with a team of professionals. When I noticed that, I started to dedicate myself more to the roadmaps and responsibilities of each profession.
I already had the "big picture" of the roadmaps, I broke them down very easily using kanban and I already knew where to start.
So what?
For three months, I studied with the self-taught way, and I learned a lot. I chose to start my learning journey with the data analysis track, using free content available online.
What will I learn tomorrow? Where will this take me? Stay tuned and find out ツ
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