I have no passion anymore in my job and want to transition to a different position. I need some advice.

Hello there!

I am a frequent lurker on this website, but today I want to ask you guys for some advice regarding the topic in the title and I am going to use a throwaway account because I want to stay anonymous.

For the past 2,5 years, I have been working as a QA Engineer/Test Automation Engineer. However, in the past months, I feel like this type of work is not suited for me. I feel stuck and I genuinely don't like doing this work anymore.

What I want to do is to transition into a different role within IT. I have been building projects, learning/experimenting with new frameworks/languages and I noticed I am interested in working with data science/machine learning. I have been checking out a lot of job postings, but a lot of them say I need to have a master's degree in computer science (or something related to it) and have some work experience.

So I have been researching and I have roughly two choices:

• Pursuing a master degree (possibly parttime, though not sure if I am able to combine it with my job) and then try to apply for jobs related to data science/engineer/machine learning
• Learn the skills while working at my current job and get a job in the field I am interested in (in this case data science/machine learning)

So what advice do you guys have for me?

Some background that might help:

• Have a business bachelor degree
• Worked as freelance front end developer for 1.5 years
• Worked as a QA/Tester for 2.5 years
• Volunteer on managing a platform on AWS
• Lives in the Netherlands

Comments

[Louis Low]

You can have all my personal machine learning notebooks. I am a practical person. When I studying the subject, I rather not learning any exotic frameworks or libraries at first. Enjoy!

Do what you like, but you should have the income to support your dream. Work is work. Just that. At the same time, you can pursue your dream or hobby, maybe one day turn them into a business.

[Ruben Sanchez]

Not sure in what kind of company do you work, but if your current company has a data science team, you could hopefully request to do a shadowing session with them. If the company has a good culture of collaboration, you could learn a lot that way. But ultimately, in order to move to work doing this, is not enough with you learning, but also need to have a project that displays your skills. A recruiter will be much more impressed if you show something rather than if you explain which courses you took.

Otherwise, you could search for companies requiring very light ML work (although sometimes that could just be classified as data analysis or business intelligence) and work from there.