How much do you need to know to do advertise yourself as a data analyst?

I am against the practice of writing custom resumes with the intention of defeating automated search algorithms. Sure, changing your desired job title from data analyst to data scientist sounds like a trivial issue. But all those trivial changes add up.

The OP is an economist / finance major with some experience using Stata and GARCH models looking for a data analyst position. That sounds pretty honest. Now, suppose the OP wants to apply for a data scientist position at Chase bank that requires expertise with SAS and Oracle database systems. What could happen?

The OP customizes their resume to say "Economist / finance major with some experience using Stata and GARCH models looking for a data scientist position". Small change, probably no big deal. The change from analyst to scientist probably implies the OP has some experience with databases and data mining, but not a huge change.

Now, suppose they customize a little further: "economist / finance major looking for a data scientist position, hoping to learn more about SAS and Oracle database systems". Slightly bigger change. This adds all the key words for the job search, while not entirely misrepresenting the OP's skill set.

Now let's take it to the extreme: "economist / finance major looking for a data scientist position, hoping to work more with SAS and Oracle database systems". It doesn't read much different from thy previous change, but now it really misrepresents the OP's skills.

Customizing your resume is a very slippery slope. IMO, data scientist is a very different position than data analyst. People sometimes use the terms interchangeably, but data scientist usually implies a background in computer science or machine learning statistics while data analyst usually implies "discipline-specific experience" (eg financial experience for working in finance, biology or chemistry experience for working in medicine). I think the OP would be totally appropriate to apply for data analyst positions that require expertise in economics and finance. Any data scientist position or any analyst position outside of finance / econ would probability be a bad fit and a waste of other people's time.

/r/statistics Thread Parent