This chapter covers
- Different paths beyond senior data scientist
- The opportunities and risks of possible career trajectories
Through the last part of this book, we’ve covered how to flesh out your career: learning to cope with failure, joining the community, and switching jobs. As your career strengthens, you’ll eventually want to decide where that career is heading. It’s not obvious what options data scientists will have as they progress upward; becoming a manager is one possibility, but it’s not the only one.
In this chapter, we cover three common career trajectories for a data scientist—moving into management, becoming a technical leader, and switching to independent consulting—as well as the benefits and drawbacks of each.
The management option is what most people think of when they think about career growth. Managers are the people who lead teams, including hiring and promoting, setting strategy, and giving career mentoring. Principal data scientists are people who are masters of their field, and companies rely on them to solve difficult technical problems. Independent consultants are data scientists who have enough skills and a large-enough network to be able to freelance for a living. See figure 16.1 for an extremely high-level summary of the paths in this chapter.
