Onboarding At Kohl's Data Science
Week 1–6: Review As A New Grad
Starting a new job can be stressful, especially during a pandemic when you are working from home. Meeting new people remotely can be overwhelming, and starting a new routine is stressful since our brains crave predictability and don't like change. About a month ago, I started my new job at Kohl's as an associate data scientist coming fresh out of graduate school. I wasn't sure what to expect as I have never worked in retail and for a big company such as Kohl's, but I was very excited about all the learning opportunities ahead of me. In this article, I will share my onboarding experiences and how Kohl's put all my worries aside from day one when I started my new journey.
Week 1–3: Supply Chain Crash Course:
I attended a corporate onboarding event on my first day, which helped me settle in and get familiarized with the working environment. On my second day, I was introduced to my team, which works in the supply chain space. The goal for the first three weeks was for me to get familiarized with the whole environment and attend as many meetings as possible to understand better what my team was trying to accomplish. As a data scientist, you first need to understand the business before jumping into any data-related work. Hence getting up to speed with the supply chain knowledge was the highest priority.
During my second week, I attended a three-day supply chain workshop. The timing of this workshop couldn't have been better since everyone in the supply chain space participated in the workshop. The event was an excellent opportunity for me to learn more about supply chain and meet people from different teams.
It was finally time for me to get together with a senior data scientist to help me get set up with my development environment during week three. I assumed that I could freely download different software from the internet, but I quickly learned that things work differently in big companies. To access various software, you have to make a request online, and once your request is approved, the application becomes automatically available on your machine. I jumped right into downloading Visual Studio Code, which is my favorite IDE (Integrated development environment), Anaconda, and RStudio. By the end of week three, I felt more comfortable in my environment as I understood the overall process of navigating through the company's dev environment. In addition to that, I was fully integrated into the team, and I had a better understanding of the business problems we were trying to solve collectively as a group.
Week 4–6: An Eye-Opening Experience
During weeks four and five, I started having meetings with folks that introduced me to the enterprise's data platform. Since I was working in the supply chain space, I needed to get educated on the data infrastructure within supply chain. This was an eye-opening experience since there are many different systems in the supply chain landscape, and I was only used to working with datasets that were only a click away from Kaggle or other sources throughout my time in graduate school.
Through week six, my team welcomed a senior data scientist to the team. I was waiting for that moment a lot. Coming out of graduate school, I was looking forward to learning from a senior data scientist. In that short time, I already learned how important it is to communicate data science concepts in a simple manner to non-technical people. The simplicity the senior data scientist communicated through various data science concepts was remarkable to observe.
Final Words:
Continuous learning is something every data scientist needs to do. Technology evolves so quickly, and it is essential to stay up to date with the latest technological advancements. However, continuous learning is not always about technical skills. Domain knowledge is a crucial aspect of data science as well. As I mentioned earlier, if you don't understand the business, then data science becomes irrelevant. Hence, the first six weeks were an eye-opening experience for me personally, and the onboarding process couldn't have been better. The work culture at Kohl's Technology is fantastic. Everyone has been super friendly, and being part of this fantastic team made me realize that joining Kohl's was the best decision I made. I hope this article gave you a better understanding of my data science onboarding experience at Kohl's as a new grad. Thank you and until next time!✌️
