Data science career fairs are largely unheard of because they are generally held with larger IT-themed career fairs, more popular among recruiters who look for young talent. Career fairs are networking events which bring together talent and employers to discuss the varied organisations and opportunities available in the fields.
These are important breeding grounds because they present excellent opportunities for employers to strengthen their on-campus recruiting efforts. These fairs also give students a good opportunity to get a good head-start in their career, secure internships and perhaps land a job. The career fairs also feature relevant workshops which can are useful from an industry perspective.
Here Are The Top Reasons How Career Fairs Are Relevant For Students
Gain Internships: With several departments working together, career fairs present an excellent opportunity to undergraduates, graduate students and postdocs working in data science field to connect with companies and research labs looking for permanent employees and summer interns in data science positions.
Understand The Hiring Process: From top companies to startups and research labs, career fairs will help you understand the hiring process in a company and also help you understand what recruiters look for. And these interviews are tough to clear and have multiple screenings. There are a series of steps a candidate is expected to go through, right from the researching about company or position to clearing phone screenings, preliminary tests and long in-person job interview.
Get Exposed To Newer Trends And Understand Organisations: Career fairs are an excellent way to understand the ecosystem and learn how to kick-start the data science career. They also present an excellent opportunity to be exposed to newer trends and emerging organisations.
Opportunity To Gain Unbiased Feedback From Leading Tech Organisations: According to Open Data Science Conferences, Career Fairs are also an excellent way to speak to hiring managers and get an unbiased viewpoint on skillset and how to level up. In other words, it presents an opportunity to understand how to fill the skill gap and mark out your skills path.
Direct Face Time With Hiring Managers: Career fairs can expose candidates to the best hiring companies and also allow hiring managers to fill the need for immediate hires. It allows prospective candidates to fast-track the screening process and gets a direct offer from a company, thereby reducing the time to getting hired substantially.
Understand What Industry You Wish To Specialise In: Today, the role of a data analyst and data scientist has become ubiquitous and cuts across various domains. And career fairs have a great mix of leading organisations from various sectors, such as manufacturing, financial services, logistics and eve government-focused agencies. This will help you understand which domain is best suited to your interest and skill-set. For students who are pursuing PhD, career fairs can help them in balancing their academic training with the industry’s demands.
Career fairs will help keep technical skills up-to-date: For students looking to build a career in data science, Career fair can help in assessing the skills landscape and find out what’s the industry standard. For example, SAS, R and Python have emerged as the most in-demand skills for data modelling while organisations heavily use Teradata and Informatica for data management.
Outlook
How well and efficiently talent is sourced is one of the key points HR which they try to address during career fairs. That’s why staffing organisations try to find candidates who can address key challenges rather than just try to fulfil the job requirement. From successful data science startups like InMobi, Paytm and Uber to leading tech organisations, companies of all size are deploying data science models to scale their businesses effectively and also get timely insights about future investments. These companies have data science at their core.
So to meet the growing demand of skilled practitioners, companies have turned to third-party vendors (online skilling platforms) and partnered with universities to provide accessible resources to create a pool of talent. There is also a spurt in self-paced platforms which can enable candidates to learn while they work. According to our annual study, as compared to global estimates, India contributes 10% of open job openings currently. Growth in the number of data science jobs globally was much higher than in India. Also, the top 10 leading data science organisations in India with the most number of analytics openings this year are – JPMorgan, Accenture, Microsoft, Adobe, Flipkart, AIG, Ernst & Young, Wipro, Vodafone and Deloitte.
