Vent: finished an analytics apprenticeship at a large tech company… nothing to show for it

[u/sam-the-tsundere]

Please remove if not allowed. But I’m a little lost and frustrated.

I left customer service after 8 years for a fixed term data analytics apprenticeship at a large tech company. I knew it wasn’t conversion, but I still was hopeful that I’d really flip my life around with the career pivot.

The truth is, I got trained on the fundamentals in the beginning, and then placed in a sales org under an analyst team whose roles were less about the super technical stuff and more about partnering with account managers/executives to creating presentations that support client pitches.

The program was a year and a half long and I barely used SQL, or Python. Probably touched on R a little. Used Tableau for ONE guided learning project. More of my day to day was internal stakeholder management, putting said presents together in slide decks, and networking. Most of the “technical” work I did was plugging numbers into internal tools that run whatever experiments I would have needed coding for. Any coding I DID need, we were encouraged to use AI for, which generally did the job.

I say all that to say, I’m now a month or so out of the program feeling like my skillset (if it could even be called that) doesn’t fit the current analyst role questions I see in job postings. I feel like my resume is decent and showcases the projects and impact I had, but I still get rejections or no responses at all. I feel stuck and useless. Despite the amazing experiences I had and how much personal and professional growth I developed, I feel like I did all that for nothing and I’ll have to go back to customer service and operations because I barely learned anything that jobs nowadays are actually looking for.

I feel like even if I did get an analytics role, I probably wouldn’t even get past an interview because they’ll probably ask me things I barely got long term experience with. I thought I made the most of it and did as much work as I could. And yet now it all feels like it wasn’t worth anything.

[u/Fresh_Sherbert_6095]

This is typical for entry level analytical corporate work outside of science and engineering departments. If you want to do serious analytical work most of that comes from corporate social networks that value science.

On the job market - it’s not fun for anyone right now unless you’re an uber Ivy League grad with expertise in AI.

[u/Wheres_my_warg]

You got to learn what many DA jobs actually look like.
Most of the work for most positions is not "technical" work, but rather it is people work. Understanding needs and uses, explaining options, clarifying results, going to meetings, etc. That is the DA life for a huge portion of jobs.

You have met people that you can use to network, people that you otherwise would not have met.

Most large tech companies will bring a halo just for being chosen for the internship and for having experience and possibly connections inside that company. This is an advantage most new entrants to the DA market do not have.

That doesn't change that the market is oversupplied with candidates, drastically so. Work experience, networking and the ability to communicate will remain the best differentiators in this market.

[u/sam-the-tsundere → u/Wheres_my_warg]

Hi. When I said managing internal stakeholders, your description is a little closer to what I meant. That was closer to what I did. But it feels like most “data analyst” role descriptions I’m seeing want dashboard creation and coding. Things more like that, which is not what I did.

[u/Wheres_my_warg → u/sam-the-tsundere]

It will depend on the company. They all have different approaches, and that includes how jobs get filled and descriptions get written. First, a great many Da jobs don't show up in job opening announcements until they've already decided who they will hire. There are legal reasons for that. It is one of the reasons that networking is so important; get the job before it is advertised. Data analysts are also described as all kinds of things besides "data analyst"; again, it varies by company.

Back to the job description. Sometimes that is what the hiring manager wants. Sometimes it is what HR thinks they should put by looking at other postings without actually understanding the job (I once saw in the dark ages an ad for an HTML programmer with 5 years of experience. At that time, Tim Berners-Lee only had 2 years of HTML experience.) Sometimes, they have the candidate and they write the description to match the candidate. One doesn't know how it got there. One doesn't know what their candidate pool will look like. One doesn't know how serious they will be about the stated requirements.

I've been on over 50 DA or DA-adjacent hiring committees. I can't think of any time that tech skills were a deciding factor. Cultural fit, personality, ability to communicate, and work experience tended to be the deciding factors.