Hello, I’m Akash Raj,

I have switched my career from a Manual tester to Data Scientist. I am sharing my career transition journey and experience, hope it will be helpful to you. So, I started my career as a manual tester in Tata Consultancy Services. This was not something I asked for but got through random allocation.

On 22nd November I started my normal ILP training as a fresher. This went on for about a month. I was part of batch which was trained on Mainframes technology. After this I was automatically (without my permission:( selected into a project which had AS400 technology.

This technology is quite similar to Mainframes. I requested everyone one a lot to put me in some other projects. I told them that I know java please give me some java projects but all the words fell on deaf ears. Finally my manager convinced me by saying that this particular technology has lots of development work and has lots of opportunities.

I became very enthusiastic and started learning the AS400 development will full focus and completed my training within 2 weeks. Then suddenly came a project where I had to work on the testing of the software developed using AS400 that too as a Manual Tester. Just see the dynamic nature of roles:( in service based companies.Then I understood that I can’t have a career in this field. So I started exploring various career options like Cyber Security, embedded systems, Data Science, learning DSA etc.

I did courses from udemy, coursera and youtube. I was able to understand most of the concepts but whenever I used to sit with a dataset and a problem statement I used to become clueless of as how to proceed. I used to lack lot of confidence.My friends then suggested that I join institutes like great learning which offer premium data science courses at 3 lakh rupees. I didn’t agree to it as i didn’t have money and I even didn’t want to ask my father for this. I decided to do entire self learning.

After this I started working on projects from Kaggle. I read other notebooks to understand their approach and just typed the same code they had written. Slowly I started doing projects entirely on my own. Doing projects was the game changer for me.

It entirely boosted my confidence. In the process I had made a decision that sometime in future I will make this kind of arrangements where people could do learning through projects that too at affordable price.

Meanwhile in my project I kept asking for release from my manager multiple times. Finally one day my manager said that he will give me release seeing my dedication to learn Data Science. Actually he came to know that I come to office even during weekends to learn Data Science. Finally my hard work started opening my doors!

Then I built a very nice resume based on all the personal projects I had done and starting sending mails to managers handling Data Science projects within TCS. Getting the mails was a task in itself. You can say I did manual web scrapping of mail ids of Managers from their internal portal.I sent around 150 mails. Got back calls from 20 of them. After interview I had around 10 project offers to join from. At the end I chose a Industrial IoT Data Science project to join.

I was rejected as I did not have good grasp of the statistical testing. This being the first time I was giving any data science interview I had no clue what to expect. So it was highly probable that I got rejected.

But this rejection develop a strong desire within me for a job change within me. The very next day I made the rejection post on LinkedIn and from there a got a interview call from a startup where I got selected. 😍

But this startup didn’t give me much hike so I wasn’t much interested. But I consulted with my family, friends and seniors and after much consideration I thought to take this offer and put my resignation and in the notice period I would search for more jobs and surely get a better offer.
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First 2 months were very bad and depressing as I got to face many rejections. But things magically changed in the last month and I started to clear many interviews. At the end I had around 8 offers to choose from and in total I would have give around 40+ interviews.

After course completion you would get an opportunity to do 1 month unpaid internship with us which can be converted to a paid internship based on your performance and our requirements.
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Last but not the least, we keep sharing job openings and internship opportunities in different companies, with our learners over email.

I hope I was able to add some value through this long blog!

Good day,
Akash Raj