I often have to review resumes of fresh talents for my clients, part of the consulting services that I offer, to help my clients build up their data science and artificial intelligence capabilities. After going through many resumes of fresh talents, I thought of writing this article to help fresh talents, stand a better chance of being hired.

As a fresh person to the Data Science or Artificial Intelligence profession, it can be challenging to get into the industry, especially  when you are passionate, have done a lot of self-study, and spend time attending courses.

To help you get that job, I have two tips for you, the first one is to work on a portfolio of personal projects. Document down your thought process, show the steps that you have taken clearly. Comment your codes with details.

The second tip is your resume. Do the following:

Maths & Statistics

Show your strength in Maths & Stats modules. I feel that being strong in numbers is the biggest advantage you can have as it shows that you can take on analysis, machine learning, or number crunching. Together with proactiveness, it helps to show that you have the potential to solve business challenges with data

Programming

Show that you have SQL, Python, or R programming experience. State down how you have been using the programming languages, for instance, "Using R to clean data." or "Using Tensorflow for Machine Learning". Try to state down the packages that you have used as well. This will help your potential employer to better gauge your programming experience.

Projects

Explicitly showcase the projects you have done, school and personal. Do a quick summary of each, what you’ve done. Your potential employers will like to gauge your problem-solving skills but may not have time to go through every project in detail. So the summary you provide should be focused on the problem you are solving and the tools you used to solve the problem. The summary should be within 10 seconds (or about 25 words) window. For example, "Using Python to determine cross-selling target by looking at past purchase data."

StackOverflow & Github

State your StackOverflow or GitHub experience. These experiences help your potential employer to gauge how good your programming experience is and provide examples of your code. Over here, my suggestion is to state down important repositories to showcase your work. However, since your potential employer will likely go through all your repositories, which is a good sign, do ensure all repositories are well documented.

After touching up, do buy one or two professionals a cup of coffee and get them to review. Do ask them where their focus was during the review, as that will give you some idea where to touch up and improve.

TL:DR, all in all, showcase your application experience, knowledge in mathematics & statistics, and your programming skills.

Here are a few articles I have written to that may be useful to you. Have a look!

I wish you all the best in your learning and job hunting journey! :)

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