Healthcare Data Analyst to Data Scientist: How to make the leap?

8 Tips to Make the Transition

Feel free to share this post with friends or people you know who are data analysts who you think should consider being a data scientist.

1. Growth Mindset

   Be ready to learn and get uncomfortable with not knowing everything. Also, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Being a data scientist requires being ready to learn something new and keeping up with the latest technology. Also, you should believe that you can learn whatever is necessary.

2. Learn Statistics

   I learned statistics during graduate school. However, there are online options to learn biostatics which is fundamental for any healthcare data scientist no matter what programming language you learn. John’s Hopkins has a free course to get started.

3. Study future jobs

   I would take some time to look for 3-5 jobs that excite you and see what their tech stack is. Are they using Python + SQL or R + SQL+Tableau? They might have another technology that they are using but you need to find out so you can start learning a programming language if you don’t know one already.

4. Learn SQL

   I found two websites helpful for learning SQL. SQLZoo and Mode Analytics were both helpful in learning SQL for data science roles.

5. Learn R or Python

   I have some course recommendations in a previous post. R or Python are essential to most data science operations. Udemy and Coursera have great courses in this area. Based on the type of job you want, consider starting with one of these languages and making sure you can analyze data and perform machine learning in this language.

6. Learn Machine Learning

   There are 2 machine learning resources that every data scientist must master. The first is Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course. The second is the book Intro to Statistical Learning.

7. Add project to portfolio or personal website

   When I first got started, I had projects listed on my website to show that I understand statistics and data science. While I am not as active now, I think this is important when trying to get your foot in the door to being a data scientist.

8. Study for job interviews

   There are a lot of websites with job interview questions. This is one of the ones that I used.

“Health Data Science Newsletter” is written by Andrea Hobby, MS— an epidemiologist & data scientist. Consider financially supporting this newsletter. You will help me to write regularly about public health & data science. To support the effort, please subscribe and share here: