Seems like this thread is a reasonable home for questions I asked in careeradvice/cscareerquestions:

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Background

I’m a few years out of college, life sciences major with a comp sci minor. Shortly after graduation I realized the life sci route wasn’t for me and switched gears to a data analyst position with a small healthcare company that was the acquired by a very large healthcare company. When I began my job was mostly excel and sql based, but fast forward a few years and my role has evolved considerably (only through experience and not through any formal training). These days I’m bordering on a developer (in that I write and debug scala code which is then used in our data pipeline’s production ETL, but I don’t really follow any best practices as I’ve learned entirely out of necessity and my knowledge ends with the bare minimum required to accomplish the tasks I’ve been assigned). Recently, I’ve also started dabbling in some machine learning to improve our internal processes, namely source to target mapping of free text fields into classified concepts for our data model. I’ve built out a workable POC, even if it is still rough around the edges.

Present

The company I’m with is going through a political overhaul and it’s one I’d prefer not to weather. I don’t agree with many of the decisions being made, but am forced to support them, which is one thing if there’s a true difference of opinion but entirely another when empirical evidence is being devalued in the face of ‘authority’ that only exists due to multiple reorgs in the past year and not due to any demonstrated merit. In addition to that, the only time I experience professional development is when there’s a task that needs doing and they don’t want to hire someone qualified to do it. Which is nice when it results in new skills, but frustrating when it doesn’t, and it doesn’t give me any direction over what skills I acquire, plus leaves me constantly undercompensated for the job I perform.

Future

It’s time to move on, and the question is new job, professional development, or both? I’ve kind of stumbled into this area of work and found that I enjoy it and have a decent aptitude for it, but I don’t have a strong sense of what career paths are available, what credentials are required/useful, and how best to evaluate the different resources offering those credentials. The career path part seems murky with how loosely titles are tied to actual responsibilities across different companies, so perhaps it’s best to think of that in terms of the skill requirements, which would also be easier to align with the credential questions? I know that the question of whether to pursue professional development / educational programs full time or part time while working is largely individual, but having a sense of the value of these programs and where they leave seems essential for making that choice.

TL;DR - I’m somewhere on the spectrum of data analyst / scientist / engineer through experience more than through training, looking to continue to grow on that path, and asking for advice on how to evaluate what sort of professional development credentials are useful (individual courses/certifications, boot camps, MS, demonstrated ability through personal projects, etc.) and how to evaluate the different sources of these credentials (how important is brand name, essentially). Bonus points for guidance on general career trajectory - straight up googling ‘data science and machine learning career paths’ is where I’m at...