NB. I started writing this over four years ago, on 30 March 2019. Since then I’ve had two job changes, plus Covid, and everything else. Which is why it’s taken me so long to get started with blogging. So while this post isn’t actually the first thing on this site, I’ll leave the title as-is.
I used to be a recruiter: the sort that calls you at work, has “been given your name”, and works in the same “space” as you? Who won’t quite take no for an answer? (I wasn’t so good at this bit, which is why it wasn’t the right career for me.) Now I’m a data scientist/statistician (either title is fine) working in the British civil service. This post is about how I made that change, and maybe it will be interesting to other people who want to change careers.
The GOOR Project
I knew I disliked my work a long time before I changed careers. In retrospect it seems so obvious: I hated doing the things that recruiters really have to do. I hated cold-calling. I hated cold-calling potential customers and potential candidates.
For most of my time in recruitment I placed engineers in oil and gas1. I wasn’t as fast on the phones as many other people but because I found the work that these people did interesting, I would read up on it and relate to them that way. And it mostly worked, but I was only ever a decent performer at best. And over time I grew to despise the work: I knew I couldn’t keep doing it.
So I found ways to get involved with work projects that didn’t involve hitting the phones. I built tools for managing our data and forecasting sales2. I got more involved with management and other corporate stuff. And then I hit on the perfect project for avoiding being a salesman: I began working on Getting Out Of Recruitment.
Necessity
Unfortunately I had very few ideas about what else I could do. My educational credentials were limited3, which limited my options. Then in January 2016, having been doing it for almost 12 years, I got fired from my last job in recruitment.
Having spent years trying to figure out what else I could do for work, I now had to get to an answer quickly enough that we could pay the mortgage. The GOOR project had been a failure thus far, but now I had no choice: I was out, and needed to find a new direction.
It was my wife that suggested data science. I worked through the Johns Hopkins Data Science MOOCs quickly enough that it felt exciting. After racing through some other MOOCs I paused and started researching what would be required to actually do the job for real. (I suspected that no one would hire me based on a short course from Coursera, and I think I was probably right.) At which point I resumed studying maths properly for the first time in about 17 years4.
At 35 years old it was the first time that I had ever really studied properly, and I couldn’t get enough of it the feeling. (I’ll write another post with more detail about what I studied.) And it was that feeling that made me believe that this was what I should be doing with my life.
Back to work
After spending seven months out of work I got my first data analyst job. It was very enter-level, but I had a kind and supportive set of colleagues: just what I needed to build confidence. Six months later I started in the Civil Service, and I’m still there. I’ve been very fortunate to work with good people, including some who pushed me at the right times to build my career, and to land a job that I genuinely enjoy.
Footnotes
No, I don’t feel great about having spent so long working in an industry that has been so destructive to the planet.↩︎
This is called forshadowing.↩︎
A Pass Bachelors in Politics and Sociology: no-one has been, nor ever will be, impressed by this.↩︎
I had spent a year after A-levels doing a maths degree, but flunked out badly. My year of partying and doing no work was fun at the time, but didn’t help with passing my modules.↩︎