These opinions are my own and I don’t mean to offend anyone or anything like that.

Doing courses is a bad way to learn DM

I got into DM without trying to get into it. I was looking for Data Science jobs after I graduated, I couldn’t get any, I saw an opportunity for DM internship and I just took it. From there on I continued my journey and built a career in DM.

The thing that made me stay in DM is the problem solving aspect of it. There are different things you could be doing in DM. Coming up with campaigns, working on how to 10x your leads and things like that. But for me, I liked looking at things from A to Z and figuring out the process; what are the critical components of this and how can I make this part better. That way I was able to bring some changes and improve the experience to the end user thereby increasing lead flow.

For me, figuring out stuff and fixing things is the reason I stayed in DM. I learnt a lot following this approach. I stumbled a lot too. There was this time when I completely broke the company’s website and ended up staying all night trying to fix it, I still couldn’t though, my boss fixed it eventually. But that experience taught me how not to do some things and the critical stuff I need to be aware of.

I wouldn’t have learned what I’ve learned by doing a course in the same amount of time. Courses teach you and make you think about how to do something right and to follow a process rather than just figuring things out. And that figuring things out part is really important for DM. Each company, each industry is unique. What worked for one might not work for another. You need to be able to adapt and figure stuff out. And the best way to learn that is by just building things, experimenting, breaking and fixing things.

Spend time tinkering with things rather than reading or viewing a lot of videos. Courses give you this streamlined approach to learn things but in reality, nothing is streamlined. Companies make choices that are not always thought out properly. Perfect companies don’t exist.

Courses can still teach you some stuff and by writing this, I’m not trying to steer you off of learning things your preferred way. Just don’t make completing a course your goal or objective. Learn things, and you can truly only learn by applying what you’ve studied. Spend more time on building things rather than just consuming information.

I hope I made some sense with this!