When I started to look for a job in my area, data, the beginning was more complicated than I could imagine. The names are an initial problem that I didn't expect. There are many names for the same or for different job roles, and the companies follow their own rules. Here jobs roles names that I saw more frequently:
- Data Analyst
- Data Scientist
- Business Intelligence (Manager / Analyst)
- Product Analyst
- And other names like Data Specialist, Data Consultant
And, depending only on the description, I could be applying or not. The naming was not useful at all. But, during the job search, it's not viable to consider every job in all of these names.
That's why I tried to see the job roles differently. I started to tag them based on their description, so I could decide whether It's one that I would apply or not.
My tags were:
- SQL
- Visualization/Reporting
- Business
- Models and Algorithms
- A/B Testing
- Data Warehouse / Datalake
Every job role had these tags or not, independent of their naming. Because I saw Data Analyst roles that asked for Algorithms, besides my idea that this should be a Data Scientist task. This method solved it.
And, of course, I made the tags based on my preferences. I didn't want a job that had a focus in Models and Algorithms, A/B Testing and Data Warehouse / Datalake because I am not much into it and I don't have experience with it. So, every time these tags appeared, I normally excluded the job role.
The tags SQL, Visualization/Reporting and Business were the ones that I wanted. If it had these three and none of the other three, I was very likely to apply for it.
It was not an automatic tagging because I didn't need it, and my job search finished rather quickly. But it worked great with me. I spent the time deciding the three points that I liked and that I'm good at, and the points that I didn't want to work with currently and didn't have much experience with. And these points are difficult to define, but were necessary in this scenario where the data-related job positions can differentiate a lot.
In summary, the process was like:
1 - Define the tags that you are looking for and the ones that you are not looking for at all. I made six in total.
2 - Started tagging the job descriptions. I could easily tag already some common points like:
- Experience with enterprise visualization software (Tableau, Looker, Metabase, etc.) and strong storytelling ability using data >>> Visualization/Reporting
- Experience in making analytical, data-driven decisions and communicating the results of analyses. >>> Business
3 - Filter the job descriptions by the tags and apply. I took a long time to apply because I like to send a specific resume and a cover letter. I couldn't and didn't want to apply for many places at the same time, and this made my filter very restricted.
For this, tagging organization and filtering, I used Trello.
I hope sharing this method helps people looking for data-related jobs and find the same issue of job roles with a not clear definition. And I hope that people find exactly what they are looking for.