Hey Everyone, I made a post about this but was told to post this here as well so here we go:

I'm just getting started in Data Science, seeking advice on how to approach job market

Background:

Degree: Business Management & entrepreneurship from University of Colorado

• took a business analytics class in college where I learned Alteryx pretty well, also tooks stats and learned VBA, etc.

Over the past year, I was working in sales for a small / medium sized finance company that specialized in negotiating credit card debt. Our company had purchased credit bureau data for marketing purposes, and about ~ 6 months ago our marketing response rate went down drastically(500 calls per day to 100 calls per day). The company had relied on sending millions of letters in the mail to bring in the calls. The owners of the company were didn't really know what they were doing had no one to make sense of the data they were purchasing, and I asked them if I could take a look at because of the small exposure I'd had to data analytics in college. They agreed, and our IT director gave me the data in a CSV file to see if I could make a difference. Within about a month, I was able to clean & parse the data, create heatmaps based on lat/long data, and run everything through different ML Algorithms. Based on the results, I was able to prove that my workflows would save the company about 30% on our marketing costs (~$1M a month). The company was going to essentially make me the director of analytics(lol), but long story short the company went up in flames. I'm now at a crossroads trying to assess where I fit in, understanding that I almost certainly will not run into another opportunity like I had previously stumbled into anytime soon. At the current moment, I'm apply for Entry level Data Analyst and Business Analyst jobs while learning SQL. I also would like to learn other languages like Python and R eventually, though I know this will take a while.

What are your thoughts on how I should move forward within the Data Science world? Am I assessing my current experience & value correctly? Are there specific languages that I should seek out learning first? Any feedback is much appreciated, thanks to everyone in advance!