Twice weekly, I share proven strategies to help data scientists get noticed, promoted, and valued. No theory — just practical steps to transform your technical expertise into business impact and the freedom to call your own shots.
The Most Useful Thing You Can Do Right Now
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Even at the best of times, the world is an uncertain place. Right now, we are far from the best of times. In periods of high uncertainty, people naturally seek out anything that might reduce that uncertainty - even just a little. Politicians understand this instinctively, which is why we've seen so many world leaders addressing their people in recent weeks, with varying degrees of success. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the value of any reduction in it. This principle doesn't stop at the geopolitical level. It applies just as much within your organisation. Your stakeholders are people, too. And while, as a data scientist, you're unlikely to be able to resolve the current global situation, you're uniquely positioned to do something genuinely valuable: help the people around you make better decisions under uncertainty, with the information available to them right now. That's not a small thing. In an environment where so much feels outside everyone's control, being the person who brings clarity - by helping leadership understand what they know, what they don't know and the level of uncertainty they're facing - is one of the most useful things a data scientist can do. It's worth remembering that this is exactly what you were trained to do. Talk again soon, Dr Genevieve Hayes |
Data Science Impact Algorithm
Twice weekly, I share proven strategies to help data scientists get noticed, promoted, and valued. No theory — just practical steps to transform your technical expertise into business impact and the freedom to call your own shots.
“I haven’t written code by hand in months - and honestly, I don’t want to anymore.” This admission came from one of the most capable data scientists I know. Until recently, he was shipping enterprise-scale code at a top multinational company - without writing a line of it himself. He now builds cutting-edge AI tools for small businesses. For him, understanding the architecture, logic and business context was enough. His ability to hand-code was slowly atrophying, but something new was growing...
The first thing I ever published that attracted any real attention was just after I finished my PhD. I started writing the puzzle page for Actuaries Magazine as a way of filling my suddenly empty weekends. I didn’t expect it to lead to anything. Yet, in the years that followed, people would walk up to me at conferences and want to shake my hand because I was “the puzzle girl”. Once someone even offered me a job because of it. Prof Rob Hyndman, one of the world’s leading applied statisticians,...
When I started my career, data science didn’t exist as a field. I trained as an actuary and statistician and those were the tools I relied on in my earliest roles. Then, around 10 years ago, I started hearing about the wonders of machine learning and became worried that my traditional training was no longer enough. So, despite already having a PhD in Statistics, I went back and completed a Masters in Machine Learning. Then came the AI wave – ChatGPT, large language models, generative AI – and...