I've been a government analyst for around 10 years, starting my career as an economist (after graduating with an economics degree). This meant I was working with numbers a lot, and I found that my strengths were mainly in statistics and working with complex datasets rather than e.g. macroeconomic analysis.
This meant I had started to build up examples of projects which were getting close to 'data science' (the term, I think, is vague). Custom interactive data vis in d3.js, forecasting and regression modelling etc.
I also started quite a large web scraping project in my own time, which led to me needing to develop a much stronger programming skillset, and gave me some more tangible examples of having done 'data sciency' stuff.
When data science took off in UK gvt a few years ago, that meant I was well positioned to make the switch. No-one had much experience at that point, so it wasn't too hard to get a first role. I think generally, there's such strong demand for data scientists that there's a mismatch between the job spec (which look scary), and the candidates (who aren't the data science unicorns the job ads ask for). So with a few projects under your belt, it worth having a crack at applying for stuff.
In terms of being satisfied: It helps working for government because we're trying to use data to make better decisions that help people. There's definitely too many buzz words and fluff, and it's difficult to help non-data scientists understand what's hard (all the data engineering and modelling leading up to delivery) and what's not (a flashy data vis) - so it's hard to convince non-data scientists to allocate resource to the best areas. The flip side is that it's really clear there is a great opportunity to change how we do analysis for the better. So overall it's pretty good.
This meant I had started to build up examples of projects which were getting close to 'data science' (the term, I think, is vague). Custom interactive data vis in d3.js, forecasting and regression modelling etc.
I also started quite a large web scraping project in my own time, which led to me needing to develop a much stronger programming skillset, and gave me some more tangible examples of having done 'data sciency' stuff.
When data science took off in UK gvt a few years ago, that meant I was well positioned to make the switch. No-one had much experience at that point, so it wasn't too hard to get a first role. I think generally, there's such strong demand for data scientists that there's a mismatch between the job spec (which look scary), and the candidates (who aren't the data science unicorns the job ads ask for). So with a few projects under your belt, it worth having a crack at applying for stuff.
In terms of being satisfied: It helps working for government because we're trying to use data to make better decisions that help people. There's definitely too many buzz words and fluff, and it's difficult to help non-data scientists understand what's hard (all the data engineering and modelling leading up to delivery) and what's not (a flashy data vis) - so it's hard to convince non-data scientists to allocate resource to the best areas. The flip side is that it's really clear there is a great opportunity to change how we do analysis for the better. So overall it's pretty good.