Interested in pivoting into a data role from a non-data role? My #1 tip: find a way, any way, to do data work in your current role. Yes, there is definitely a way to do it, in virtually any role. Is there a bunch of information scattered a bunch of Word docs or physical papers? Do you handle repetitive tasks or requests? Does customer information live in 3 different systems? The easiest way to get data experience: start a spreadsheet to organize a set of information into one place. This is a low-risk, high-reward way to dip your toe into data work as a beginner, and it’s exactly what I did at the beginning of my career to begin my pivot into the data field. Here’s how I did it:
Build data skills by tracking your work
Early in my career, I worked in an internal company support role, where I provided support services to over 40 people across the organization. I started feeling a little burnt out on doing support work, and I was interested in shifting my own career into data analytics. Those two impulses led me to start keeping an Excel sheet to log of all the support requests I handled: the date of the request, what type of support was requested, and how much time I spent on each request. That information allowed me to create pivot tables to summarize my work:
How much total time was I spending on support requests each month?
When was my most recent support request from each person?
What types of support requests were most frequent? Which took the most time?
This spreadsheet served two purposes. First, it gave me a chance to practice my Excel skills! There’s no better incentive to practice than having a real project with your skin in the game. Second, when I showed the spreadsheet to my boss, she was impressed that I was able to quantify the impact of my work, and she could use it to demonstrate the impact of her team. Pretty cool!
Even more importantly, this spreadsheet helped me identify themes in my work for the first time. Looking at those themes (“wow, I get a ton of requests for help with PowerPoint slides”) allowed me to think big-picture about how I was spending my time and how to be more valuable to the team (“could I create a slide template that would make those requests a breeze?”). This strategic thinking mindset has been highly valuable throughout my career, which leads to my next piece of advice:
Practice strategic thinking by zooming out
My second tip for pivoting into a data career: stretch your systems-thinking skills. By zooming out to analyze your own work at a higher level, you can start to see themes, and how those themes connect your everyday work to your systems. For example, when I started my support requests spreadsheet, I didn’t categorize tasks — I just typed in a quick bullet point on what the task entailed. Fast forward a few months, when I had hundreds of rows in my sheet, and I realized I’d need categories to identify meaningful trends. This forced me to strengthen a few important skills:
How to design meaningful categories based on my existing data
How to set up data-validation and drop-down menus in Excel
How to develop narrative and an action plan around the trends I saw
I noticed at some point that I had a ton of requests for help creating PowerPoint slides. I decided that categorization had become too broad, so I split it into 2 categories, one for each type of slide I was being asked to create. This helped me realize that one type of request was coming in at a high volume, from several different people, at specific points in the year, whereas the other requests came in more consistently each month. Once I identified this trend, I organized my schedule to start preparing those time-sensitive slides a week ahead of when the requests would pour in, so that it wasn’t such a time-crunch to complete them. Game changer.
Just start, and learn as you go
My biggest tip: if you want to do data work, don’t wait until you’re asked to do data work or hired into a specific role. Just start, wherever you are! Once you’ve got a working spreadsheet, you can build on your skills by learning additional tools:
Use your spreadsheet to create a simple dashboard in a data visualization tool (my favorite is Hex)
Show your dashboard to colleagues or customers, and practice tweaking the visualizations based on their feedback
Get other people to provide data to your dashboard, either manually (you’ll get practice designing process) or by integrating to one of your company’s systems (tools like Zapier can be a good option to start)
If you need a little motivation to jump in, check out this essay on acting with high agency — it might put a little pep in your step. Have more questions about data career paths? Hit reply and let me know, and I’ll answer them in a future issue!
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