I’ve been getting many messages where people say, my age is more than 30 or 40. Can I learn data analytics because I’m not happy in my job and I see brighter or better opportunities in the field of data science etc. I want to express my thoughts on that question in this article and I want to be extremely honest here.
I don’t want to give you any false motivation. So before I answer that question let me mention three real stories of people who made transition at the later age in their life. Zubin Pratap was a lawyer and he decided to learn coding at the age of 38. He used to come to a high court of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India to fight his cases and then at age 38 he realized okay he should be doing coding because that IT career is kind of cool.
He learned coding and I think within two or three years he got a job at Google as a software engineer.
I’m also going to provide a link of Zubin’s LinkedIn and other two people’s LinkedIn. So if you want to talk to them directly these are very nice people they can talk. So just send them a message on LinkedIn directly and you can know more details.
So that is Zubin’s story. So he learned coding at 38. He got a job at Google as a software engineer then he changed a company I think sometime back but he’s in IT field now.
The second story is of Ashish Babaria who was in agro trade business who is still doing agro trade business actually. At the age 44 he thought he should learn data analytics. So he started learning data analytics through online courses through YouTube videos. So he is a person who doesn’t have any technical background or any technical degree a businessman.
He learns data analytics at a later age and within one year he just kills it. The dashboards the Power BI dashboards that he builds they are killer dashboards. Something that even I or my business partner Hemanan cannot build you know the whole UX part of it is super amazing and the insights also that he’s generating is super amazing.
The third person is Michel Santos. He was a physiotherapist till 51. Yes at the age of 51 he got a job as a data analyst.
So when he worked as a physiotherapist for 30 years you know close to 30 years at 47 or 48 he realized that he wants to do a course in data science because you know the whole work from home flexibility higher pay all these benefits that you get in IT career he wanted to you know feel that experience.
So when he was doing his physiotherapist job he would work whole day he would come home and he enrolled into some online data science degree program so he would study every day along with family and full-time job and he got a lot of ups and downs because you know things are difficult especially when you’re learning at the older age and also when you have a full-time job family so many responsibilities to take care of but he stayed on the path and it took him four years. So he started at 47 at 51 he completed his degree.
So it took four years otherwise it would have taken I think two years or less and then he applied for jobs in healthcare domain only because he had healthcare domain knowledge. So he applied for jobs in healthcare domain and he got a job in a company called Evernote as a data analyst recently.
Now what does these three inspirational stories tell us? The thought that come to your mind is, okay maybe these people are genius you know and maybe I am just giving you this outliers to just give you a false motivation. So when I asked this question to Zubin that, Zubin maybe you are very intelligent then Zubin, told me that he came across 16 such lawyers 16 who have made transition to programming by learning coding. So Zubin told me that he’s not an exception there are so many transition stories are happening it’s just that we don’t know.
So my advice on anyone who is trying to make a transition let’s say you are a teacher you don’t like your job and you want to come to IT or data analytics career or data science career or you are in some other field mechanical engineer, HR, anything, first thing you need to think about is the thing that I’m seeking is that the right career because when I don’t like my current situation, any outside situation just looks good to me right grass is always greener on the other side of the fence and since data science and data analytics are buzzwords and there is so much hype in the media nowadays that shouldn’t be the reason that you should go and do that you need to figure out your Ikigai.
Ikigai means pursue a career which is a nice intersection between something you love something you’re skillful at and something that world can pay you for and I write another article the exact technique on how you can figure that out you know it requires some experimentation, because let’s say I want to play cricket, how do I know I will like playing cricket, well just play cricket for two months and then you will know similarly if you want to learn data analytics or data science.
Don’t enroll in expensive courses, you know maybe buy some cheap courses online or even YouTube. YouTube has so many free playlists right or other channels I’m not saying you watch my channel I mean you can watch anything like internet is a humongous resource that you have where you can get all this knowledge for free using this free knowledge or by paying some small fees learn some skill for a month or two months and after that you probably get some idea whether you are liking it or not and once you do this experiment with few few things right, let’s say you can do data analytics course for two months then two months do maybe UX designing course you know try two three options then at the end of six or eight months you will figure out what do you want to do once you figure it out stay on that path you know seek delayed gratification which means you don’t expect any miracle okay.
There is no shortcut to a success. It’s gonna take time, it took four years for Michelle, for Zubin it took less but you know most of the cases it is gonna take time. You will have hurdles but if you stay on the path you can achieve that outcome and you have to be grateful that you live in a world where very precious resources are available for free on internet.
Previously, if someone wants to go study in Stanford or let’s say MIT they have to get admission in that college when internet wasn’t there. Now with internet you get MIT, Harvard lectures for free on internet right, so if you are living in a small town of Rajshahi or a small town of Bangladesh or village in Pakistan you have access to same quality education that a person living in California has.
So the playing field has been leveled and you can leverage this to your benefit. All right, so once again I’m not giving any false motivation but I myself know so many people who have kept this positive attitude and they have achieved a success that you would not even believe in it okay. So it is up to you, if you want to be positive and try something out or you just want to be nagging that no now I’m 35, I’m old, you know there’s a 35 year old, you can say okay, I’m old I can’t do it which is fine then don’t complain.
Continue doing what you’re doing, all right so I hope this was useful and by the way one more thing if you’re feeling down let’s say you are learning something you’re upskilling, trying to transition to a new career and when you feel down, talk to people who have already made that transition. So I mentioned these three people, their LinkedIn profile, you can talk to them these are nice people send them a nice message they will respond.
Similarly you find all these people who have made this transition and try to talk to them, see they have walked on the same path that you are trying to go and they will give you the best advice and best inspiration and best motivation. I wish you all the best. If you like this article, share with people who want to change their career in data science. I will catch you in the next one. Bye.