Data science is a constantly evolving discipline. New frameworks, packages, research, tools and datasets are being released. Thanks to the industry’s vibrant ecosystem there’s never a shortage of the new and cutting edge to learn. Stay hungry to learn these skills and new technologies. Companies are constantly looking for innovative new tools to cut costs, increase efficiency and improve the quality of output. Proving you’re the type of person that likes to keep up to date with these kinds of things is a fantastic signal to the company that you may be able to potentially improve the way things are done in the future. Furthermore, it presents you as being deeply submerged in the space.
Managers want you to be able to teach them something new as well as vice versa. Injecting new ideas into the team increases the team’s cognitive diversity and makes the team more likely to find the best methods to solve problems going forward.
Whilst keeping up to date with the most recent developments in Data science, be it in machine vision, natural language understanding, reinforcement learning or any other field is important, so too is showing interest in ideas outside of the world of data science. Smart people have the common characteristic of being curious and wanting to know how and why things work in my experience. For example they become enveloped in some obscure historical period in time or become obsessed with wanting to know how the human body works, random knowledge like this is often found in data scientists. If that sounds like you then that’s great. You’re curious and enjoy learning things.