Community Spotlight: Career Switch

By: Chahat Chadha / May 26, 2020

Community Spotlight: A series highlighting Aspire to Her community members and their experiences early in their careers.

Who we’re featuring this week: Chahat Chadha
Position: Assistant Manager, CRM & Analytics at L’Oreal

You graduated NYU with a degree in Media, Culture and Communications and then a year later, took a leap of faith into Data and Analytics. Today you are a hands-on-keyboard SQL/Python coder. Why did you make this switch and what steps did you take to do so?

I majored in Communications because I’d wanted a career in advertising and storytelling. I had several traditional marketing and social media internships in college, but none of them truly fulfilled me. I was always yearning for more. Although I’d never been a math person, I found myself to be most stimulated when I was involved in some sort of market research project. I loved finding trends in data and providing recommendations for strategies. After graduating, I was lucky to be able to do just that within Consumer Insights teams at L’Oreal and Trendalytics. But I quickly realized that my strengths were skewing toward the qualitative and creative side of marketing; my quantitative skills could’ve used some work. I knew that to create a long and meaningful career in this space, I would need to learn to code, understand the basics of data science, and sharpen up my analytics skills.

I took a 12-week Data Analytics course at General Assembly, where I learnt advanced Excel skills, SQL and Tableau. I spent hours writing SQL queries, and found free data sets online to massage and analyze for practice. When I wasn’t in class, I was listening to data podcasts (Data Analytics Power Hour, Data Crunch) and attending (free!) business and analytics networking events. I made a conscious effort to ask more analytical and data-centric questions at work and to friends that worked in similar fields. After a few months of this, I gathered the confidence to apply for a Data Analyst position at L’Oreal, and have never looked back!

What’s your advice for anyone thinking about making a career change, especially in a field that isn’t as drawn out as the traditional ones?

Employers value diversity. Don’t hold yourself back from making a career change just because your degree or formative experiences are in a different field than the one you’re now looking to explore. Chances are that the skills you’ve picked up in your current field will not only in some way, shape, or form translate into your desired role, but will also give you an edge during the application process. Educate yourself on the basic skills needed for your ideal job, and start building that tool kit. There is an abundance of resources – both in-person and online, both paid and free – at your disposal to learn skills like graphic design, SQL, Python, Product Management, creative writing, and more at any point in your career.

If you’re looking to break into a non-traditional field, learn to embrace the ambiguity that comes with it. Fields like data science, UX design, personalization, etc. are constantly evolving. Career trajectories in these fields are not straight lines, and sometimes they’re not even lines at all…. In my own experience, I’ve often found myself zig-zagging between different skills and questioning what my next step is. But I’ve come to learn that that is the joy of working in data, and that the ambiguity that comes with it keeps things fresh, challenging and interesting.

If you’re interested in sharing a career experience/lessons learned with other Aspire to Her community members, please fill out this quick form!