Strength in Numbers: Building an Advisory Board for your Data Career

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Learning Data

5 min readMay 22, 2023

Data careers are diverse, challenging, rapidly changing, and rewarding. Whether you’re a Excel Wizard, a Database Demon, Python Powerhouse, Tableau Titan, or you just used your first Google Sheets formula, it’s critical to stay up to date on the broader field and keep your skills sharp in order to get the most out of your career.

I’ve assembled a list of data practitioners, influencers, and resources that have helped me stay up to date and have given me a lot of insight into the tools and roles in this field. In other words, a healthy board of advisors to give me the ideas and info I need to navigate this ever-changing landscape.

The Maven Team — My team and a great group to follow!
The Data Rockstars — Influencers with big follower counts and big ideas
The Experts — specialize in technical content for their tool(s) of choice.
The Shepherds — have helped many break into their role of choice
The Resource Hubs — Publications that aggregate lots of great ideas

The Maven Team

Ok, so I’m a bit (a lot) biased, but our team puts out a lot of great content ranging from best practices for tools like SQL, Excel, and Python, to discussing how to break into and progress in a data career. Our Medium publication is just getting started, giving us the freedom and flexibility to do deeper dives on topics and invite our friends to do the same.

I know it seems like a lot, so if you were to only follow one of the list below, I’d subscribe to our LinkedIn page as it helps aggregate the best content from our Youtube, Tiktok, blog, and more. I encourage you to take a look at the recent posts from each author and see what appeals to you.

The Rockstars:

If you’ve been in the field of analytics for a little while, and participate in communities like LinkedIn and Medium, you’ve likely seen content from the following folks pop up. With sky-high follower counts and a diverse audience, their content tends to skew towards the bigger picture of the data field and where it’s heading rather than granular technical advice, but following these folks is a good way to stay up to date on the state of the industry from folks who have a lot of credibility.

· Cassie Kozyrkov (Medium)

· Danny Ma

· Kate Strachnyi (Medium)

· Helen Wall

· Vin Vashishta

· Ravit Jain

The Experts:

The following folks have excellent YouTube channels on analytics tools. David does a great job covering a wide array of tools, while Guy in a Cube has amazing PowerBI content. Teddy Petrou is one of my favorite writers on the analytics ecosystem in Python, and I owe a lot to his Medium page for helping me think critically about best practices in Pandas.

For data quality, data engineering, technical best practices, as well as some great laughs, I suggest following the folks below. Zach and Mark are both data engineers, providing tremendous technical knowledge on topics like SQL along with their journeys into the field. Owen Price often pushes the limits of the Microsoft stack and shares great content around this.

If you’re interested in the world of data science and machine learning, I highly suggest taking a look at this list. I have a particular soft spot for Josh Starmer’s StatQuest channel, which demystifies Statistics and Machine Learning concepts in a fun and intuitive manner, and is one of my first stops if I’m revisiting an algorithm or concept that I’ve gotten rusty with.

Chip Huyen is a leader in the world of production ML and the cutting edge of the field. Finally, Daliana Liu does incredible work with her podcast and will expose you to a lot of important data science concepts and resources.

The Shepherds:

To be clear, these folks don’t lack expertise, but their content is really geared towards folks entering the data field. Many of them share great technical content, but where they really shine is acting as a mentor to aspiring analysts and data scientists, shedding light on the paths they took and highlighting the challenges along the way.

This first group of folks are like the best friend you had that recently jumped into a new career and are begging you to join them! They’ll give you pro tips for building a path into data analytics, whether its using AI to help with your resume, talking about how analysts spend their time, and how to navigate the professional world while acknowledging that it can be a rollercoaster of a journey.

Very similar to the group above, but more focused on the journey into data science and machine learning. Dan Lee runs datainterview.com, which is the best data science interview prep websites I’ve seen. He also shares great pro tips on what you need to know and how to learn it on his linkedin.

Tiffany Teasley, the “Data Sistah”, provides great tips to career switchers into data science, and in particular those that might be older than the average career switcher.

Carly is one of the funniest people in My LinkedIn feed and provides outstanding resources for perfecting your data resume.

Resource Hubs

The following aren’t influencers, but incredibly valuable resource hubs right here on Medium that provide a wealth of knowledge. Not every article is a home run, but getting a medium digest on a weekly basis that includes articles from these publications will keep you in the know on new tools, expose you to how other analysts think about their projects and teach you new tricks on a regular basis:

Finally, it needs to be said that generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard are a great place to start for any general knowledge.

ChatGPT & Bard

This was a surprisingly hard article to write, mostly because the list of folks I’ve learned from is much longer. Are there any data influencers I missed? Add them in the comments below!

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Happy learning!