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When speaking with the CILIP community I realised that by dealing with metadata daily makes you a truly worthwhile candidate for the data family.
INSIGHT
Data driven
Resilience and disruption I
AM no stranger to having to adapt to life’s curve balls. Four years ago, I was a stay-at-home mum of two on the edge of a nervous breakdown. However, through a chain of events I had orchestrated I soon found myself slap bang in the middle of the fourth industrial revolution. I come from an Arts bachelor’s degree, was pretty rubbish at maths and (after having been expelled from Sixth Form college for being a rebel), I understood I was not a natural follower. I have, for years, underestimated the value of what those experiences taught me. I used to be ashamed of working in the business world and almost apologising for not having an MBA, instead having a historic love affair with classics, art, film and literature. It is only recently that I have taken time to celebrate these interests, and now when I blog for Eden Smith I add in the cultural nuances and film references love. I can’t quite believe it took me almost half a decade to realise this. However, all these experiences have given me lineage, quality of experiences, rich in detail and a whole host of reference points that I feel gives my data community a sense of journey and learning.
Bridging the gap
I was invited to speak at the CILIP Cymru Wales annual conference at Aberystwyth University in 2018. The topic was about The Art of Resilience and how you can re-imagine your career and that hopefully will make you a) happy primarily, but b) will help you see yourself through a different lens. If you are a woman reading this then you might have seen the data that women will only apply for a role which they feel they have 100 per cent of the skills, whereas men will
July-August 2021
apply even if they think they have only 60 per cent of what is required. I looked at how many women there are in CILIP and the data community and can see a lot of work needs to be done to bridge that gap. I spoke then of bucking that trend and applying for my job now, even though I did not feel I had everything they wanted. Fast forward to the present day and I have been commended by the founders of Eden Smith as being one of their ‘best hires’ because I have this uncanny ability to spot opportunities, forge relationships with people, and be myself – and people tend to do business with people they trust. When speaking with the CILIP community I realised that dealing with metadata daily makes you a truly worthwhile candidate for the data family. Your days of organising, cataloguing, referencing and reconciling gives you a head start. Transferring knowledge and skills to another area is key. Looking at key trends and insights, reading journals, books, whitepapers and case studies. I listen to podcasts, I have a mentor, I am a mentee. I have joined groups that allow me to keep learning and keep my knowledge in the data industry relevant.
The Royal Society wrote an article in 2019 about the demand for data science skills and identified four actions points, saying: “Demand for workers with specialist data skills like data scientists and data engineers has more than tripled over five years (+231 per cent). Demand for all types of workers grew by 36 per cent over the same period.”
l Developing foundational skills: ensuring our education system provides all young people with data science knowledge and skills, which will require curriculum change within 10 years;
Lucy Lynch (
lucy.lynch@
edensmith.co.uk), Head of Graduate Partnerships Nurture, Eden Smith and Honorary Industry Lecturer at University of Salford.
www.edensmith.group
l Advance professional skills and nurture talent: offering nimble and responsive training opportunities and develop training based on collaborations between the academic, public and private sectors;
l Enable the movement and sharing of data science talent: addressing barriers to mobility between industry, academia and the public sector;
l Widen access to data in a well- governed way: opening up data securely and providing access to computing power.
I realised that my Nurture programme is addressing these four key areas in its own way. Now it is on a small scale. But like the butterfly effect, every move closer to closing the gap, to addressing imbalance has a knock-on effect. I would rather be one step closer to making a difference to a collection of people’s lives every year, than not. So please look at your skills, your abilities, your attributes in a new light as I promise you it’s pretty electric moving the needle and being filled with purpose, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly but always moving forward. IP
l
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/ projects/dynamics-of-data-science/
l
www.linkedin.com/business/talent/blog/ talent-acquisition/how-women-find-jobs- gender-report
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL 45
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