Opinion
Avoid These Five Behaviors That Make You Look Like A Data Novice
And be a trustworthy, likable data partner
With more and more data being collected every day and virtually every company priding itself on making data-driven decisions, data is at everyone’s fingertips. Data Science is becoming a hotter and hotter field by the day. You are here reading this probably because you are enthusiastic about data and want to be able to develop expertise in the field. With all the boot camps and online classes nowadays, everyone can feel like a data expert in months or even weeks; but being a truly helpful, likable, and credible “data partner” to co-workers and other stakeholders takes more than just familiarity with SQL and Python and basic stats knowledge.
There are noticeable differences between people who are new to the data world and those who truly understand how to handle data and be helpful data partners. I have observed people who demonstrate behaviors that amount to no less than waving your arms in the air and screaming “I’m new to this, I have no idea what I’m doing…”. And I have done most of these things myself when I first started as a data scientist. These behaviors can diminish your credibility as a data partner quickly and make people question your understanding of the subject matter. So hopefully I can…
