Hi All, sorry for the essay but hopefully one or two of you on here are in a position of knowledge; myself and partner are sick of travelling from the midlands every weekend to follow our hobbies, so want to move to Sheffield. She found a job and started this week so now it’s on me to find something too. Problem is I have quite a specialised role in model-based software design for automotive industry – I’m struggling to find industries to port this over to in Sheffield so it seems like a good time to retrain as a data scientist, which is a field I’ve been eyeing up for a while now.

The big question is, would a data science masters be enough to get me a job? There seems to be a decent number of openings (mainly in civil service) but they almost exclusively look for a fair degree of experience. This is the big issue, as I already have a masters so the second would be entirely self funded. I should be able to transfer a lot of knowledge over from my current role to become useful pretty quickly – I’m certainly not a fresh grad and even have a few data automation related successes to my name but if competition is high it could be a struggle.

On the other hand there are bloggers across the internet singing the praises of online self learning, but this seems like a long hard slog and maybe only realistic in a capital city.

Any thoughts? TIA

Would your skills suit something like Credit Risk modelling in the finance sector? Believe me, there is and will be a high demand for these in the next few years. And plenty of potential employers in the north of England generally. Not so sure about Sheff, but certainly Leeds.

Hi All, sorry for the essay but hopefully one or two of you on here are in a position of knowledge; myself and partner are sick of travelling from the midlands every weekend to follow our hobbies, so want to move to Sheffield. She found a job and started this week so now it’s on me to find something too. Problem is I have quite a specialised role in model-based software design for automotive industry – I’m struggling to find industries to port this over to in Sheffield so it seems like a good time to retrain as a data scientist, which is a field I’ve been eyeing up for a while now.

The big question is, would a data science masters be enough to get me a job? There seems to be a decent number of openings (mainly in civil service) but they almost exclusively look for a fair degree of experience. This is the big issue, as I already have a masters so the second would be entirely self funded. I should be able to transfer a lot of knowledge over from my current role to become useful pretty quickly – I’m certainly not a fresh grad and even have a few data automation related successes to my name but if competition is high it could be a struggle.

On the other hand there are bloggers across the internet singing the praises of online self learning, but this seems like a long hard slog and maybe only realistic in a capital city.

Any thoughts? TIA

Give me a shout if you do decide to move to Sheffield, we’re moving to Sheffield as well for the same reasons and because my wife is also enrolled on the Data Science MSc for September 2021.

On the other hand there are bloggers across the internet singing the praises of online self learning, but this seems like a long hard slog and maybe only realistic in a capital city.

My wifes working towards her CFA level 3 as well, word on the grapevine is that most of the financial world will be happy with 3 days in the office in the future. So our idea is that we’d only move back to London (if at all) if she was earning stupid money as a quant. London is so expensive to rent that living near the train station in Sheffield and commuting down to stay in a hotel 2-3 nights is still cheaper/breaking even depending on how many nights you stay and how good the hotel is.

Have you considered a less applied MSc, like stats or CS? DS MSc’s don’t seem to get great feedback online but not sure how fair that is.

At my place anyone who is vaguely numerate with a command of excel and python is calling themselves a data scientist so I reckon you’ll be fine with an MSc 🙂

Also keep an eye out for local government data and modelling posts. There is an almost never ending stream of requests for modelling and forecasting at the moment for me (local authority transport officer), be that patronage, economy, inflation, etc. etc.

HSBC is pretty big in Sheffield although I hear they’ve moved from Silver Street Head. The Three Tuns must be very quiet (I worked there when it was still Midland Bank)

You’ll have no trouble getting work as Data Scientist with an MSc in Data Science (and any kind of personality / work ethic / prior professional experience). I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find other software work though – the whole world is working from home so no need to be too focussed on Sheffield. And there is no need to be obsessed with whatever your modelling niche is.

In your shoes I might be tempted not to do the MSc, but rather some shorter courses. e.g. Edinburgh Uni runs some online distance learning stuff https://www.ed.ac.uk/bayes/about-us/our-work/education/workforce-development/courses/data-carpentry

Code clan realised there was as much demand for data science as developers so have added that to their portfolio – will cost you less than an MSc I think (?) but more importantly is compressed into a shorter period so you are back earning quicker. https://codeclan.com/courses/data-analysis/

Problem is I have quite a specialised role in model-based software design for automotive industry – I’m struggling to find industries to port this over to in Sheffield

I thought all of the software people were now working remotely anyway?

I thought all of the software people were now working remotely anyway?

Yep we’ve just recruited someone who we’ve never met in person and are now working with remotely. He’s in a different City as well.

Your role sounds similar to mine (model based software design in auto industry in the midlands), and I’d echo the comments about working remotely. We are currently moving to at least 2+ days a week at home long term, and currently permanently at home due to COVID

HSBC is pretty big in Sheffield although I hear they’ve moved from Silver Street Head. The Three Tuns must be very quiet (I worked there when it was still Midland Bank)

A friend recently retired from hsbc in the back office IT area. She complained it’s all being done now either in India or by people less qualified than her, half her age, fir twice the money (contractors in short term gigs I guess)
They do still have a bug data centre near j36 if the M1 though, just north of Sheffield. Tankersley is an old pit village with loads of new housing going up all the time I guess for this sort of stuff. Very handy for greno,wharny and not so far from the ladybower end of the peak via strines

If you are at all mathematically inclined, I can thoroughly recommend the MSc in Medical Statistics at Sheffield University. There is a huge shortage of qualified statisticians in this country and a remote working position in Pharma is a real prospect.

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/postgraduate/taught/courses/2020/statistics-msc

Seriously, this qualification is a route to a well-paid career, be it in Industry or for the ONS.

I think if you have been ‘eyeing up’ data scientist or data analyst roles for some time then you know what kind of experience they are asking for. It seems to me you would be financially better of doing some online learning of the most commonly asked for software (e.g. the ‘data carpentry’ workshops, from the database SQL type stuff, analysis in R or python and the visualisation stuff, Shiny?) and the procedural stuff for software development (i.e. Agile) if you don’t already have those in your day to day work. You can play around in your own time on TensorFlow for example. It’s effort to learn in your own time but saves you a fortune in fees and lost income. If you can show examples on your CV and your work experience demonstrating professionalism etc, then I don’t know if the formal education is that value-adding. Having said all of that, if you want to get into high-end well-paid machine learning jobs (e.g. fintech) then a statistics Masters that focuses on Bayesian methods would be a good starter. The people I know who got very well paid jobs do have PhDs and that is a long slog of being very under-paid and under-valued and it is of course quite hard. When you look through the prospectus and description of modules in the MSc courses, do you already have those skills/knowledge?

Statistics with Medical Applications is no longer offered at Sheffield TiRed.

If you’re going to do that, go to LSHTM or LSTM (which would be commutable from Sheffield, just about).

The pay for Medical Statisticians is going up all the time, I’m considering a sideways move into it – but at the moment I’m earning good money as a consultant in pharmaceutical Quality Assurance as the job market has gone mental since Covid. I can’t get recruiters and corporate “talent acquisition” to **** off quick enough, there’s currently more money that companies are willing to blow floating around in Pharma/biotech sector than I have ever seen.

The nice thing is, is that because of the strength of the UK’s R&D and pharma regulatory environment it’s also much harder to outsource your job to India – so there’s some stability in the industry. It’s weirdly not as stressful as some other more transient industries.

If you want help with the application I’m sure that we’d be able to point you in the right direction if you decide to go down that route.

I think if you have been ‘eyeing up’ data scientist or data analyst roles for some time then you know what kind of experience they are asking for.

That’s only the roles which get advertised. Like he said:

There seems to be a decent number of openings (mainly in civil service)

I’m guessing that outside the civil service type jobs they don’t bother advertising and use recruiters, linked in, person networks etc to fill the roles.

‘data carpentry’

Learn something new every day – never heard of that phrase before!

Is the next level up ‘Data cabinet making’ 😉

Working in a AI startup I can confirm one of our DS has a finance background and has an MSc in Data science. He decided he wanted to make the switch from his previous role, decided to self fund an MSc and was really keen to get a job after this. From my personal perspective what better sort of person could you find. Also, DS people are hard to find, good ones, even harder! You’ll be fine and the sort of work you will do will likely be largely remotely based too.

Thanks for the comments all. There’s a lot to digest there, I’ll mull it over and come back with any questions! Regarding my role and remote working, because I am in the “applications” side of the department I have to work on projects from requirements right through to a driving vehicle so my employer refused my remote working request outright (even though I can be desk based for 12 months at a time and I offered to be fully flexible in being on site when needed…). I agree there are a lot of control based jobs Sheffield way but the majority are in manufacturing and PLC based which I’m not familiar with. I’m sure I could pick it up but they’re normally looking for extensive experience. The job search gets very muddled with the other end of the spectrum in the millions of “software developer” jobs that are more aimed at a computer science grad – I’m probably not doing the best job of searching but I’ve been on it for a while now.

Regarding the civil service jobs – had already spotted this and these peaked my interest the most. I’d be quite keen to work in something more “socially valuable”. However the job descriptions are very prescriptive and there’s no way I’d score enough points right now (specifically, my degree contained no statistical training).

I think next step is to compare some of the short courses suggested above against the job descriptions and see if I think they cover the required bases. Sheffield actually offer 2 MSc courses, one from the computer science school and one from information school. The former is more inline with my interests but is not available part time. Currently trying to get more information out of admissions team to assess the details of the latter. Sheffield Hallams course also looks good and cheaper but again, not part time.