17.3 Your Project Portfolio
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. You are seeking experience in the field. As you navigate through job postings, they all seem to require experience. However, if previous experience is truly a non-negotiable requirement for the position, then you would be out of the running for any position. Eventually, you want to bang your head against a wall as you shout, “How am I supposed to get experience when everyone seems to require experience first?!?”
You may feel like you are trapped inside an illogical ‘infinite loop’ that’s impossible to break. Thankfully, a project portfolio can be your solution to this riddle. Even without previous work experience in analytics, and even without internships, you can establish your own credibility – and even your own experience – through independent analytics projects.
Do not let the words “project” or “portfolio” intimidate you. A project can literally be as simple as taking any publicly-available dataset, performing some exploratory data analysis on it, and summarizing your findings. Your takeaways do not need to be earth-shattering. Perhaps you built a regression model or two with the data, and came away with some new insights about which variables were most meaningfully related to the response variable.
If you’re not sure where to start, we recommend going over to Kaggle and browsing through their dataset repository. A few online searches will quickly yield other dataset repositories that might have the type of dataset that you’d like to use. Nearly any major city in North America offers many datasets on its own municipal website, with everything from traffic data to employee salaries to restaurant inspection results.
Of course, you can search online for others’ project portfolios when you are seeking inspiration. However, authenticity really matters here. If you have picked a topic that you care about personally, and then you’ve explored it? Your genuine passion will show in an interview.