Bootcamps, fellowships, and headhunters

There's a large demand for data scientists right now, and many people are making similar career transitions to mine. A partial infrastructure exists to move people with advanced science degrees into data science by reorienting their skills a bit, and in this blog entry I want to describe the landscape as I understand it.
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Problem statement:

A group of highly educated people with a strong quantitative background would like careers analyzing data, which requires a specialized skills set including programming and statistical analysis. Very little exists in the way of secondary or tertiary education in this exact skill set. Who can make money off this problem?

Solution:

Educator-headhunter hybrids. Headhunters are formally called recruiters. They freelance or work for independent firms who match job seekers with employers, and they always get paid by the employers iff the applicant accepts a job offer. Essentially, they make money by wading through the slush pile to pick out the best candidates so the employers don't need to spend time on it.

In data science, there is a large worker pool that is not well matched to fill a recruiting demand, but could be retrained in a short time, say 6-12 weeks. The hiring companies can't retrain the workers themselves because they don't have the expertise. It would be like hiring a management consultant who had to be retrained in management theory before starting. If they could train the workers, they wouldn't need them.

The response to this demand has been two kinds of trainer/recruiter hybrids, loosely called fellowships and bootcamps. Both require an application process. Both attempt to match graduates with employers, and both reap recruiting fees from successful employment matches. Here are the differences.

Fellowships:

• Are free. Anyone who gets accepted gets a full ride.
• Are pretty short in duration. Typically about 6 weeks with full time attendance.
• Are rare. There are only two I know of.
• Have a highly competitive application process and require a PhD for admission.
• Aim at people who are around 80-90% of the way to becoming a data scientist
• Have ~100% placement rate after graduation

Bootcamps:

• Cost about $12-16k. Partial refunds are sometimes offered if graduates accept offers from their corporate partners.
• Last longer, around 12 weeks.
• Are plentiful and widespread (in major cities globally). I've seen about a dozen.
• Are still competitive, but do not require a PhD.
• Aim at people who are about 40% of the way to becoming a data scientist.
• Have ~90% placement rate after graduation.

In addition, there are stand-alond courses that don't match people with employers.

Online programs:

• Pretty cheap: ~$4k per program, or a few hundred dollars a month.
• Can be part time, and last from a month to a few months.
• Always available and open to anyone.
• Available at many levels of prior expertise.
• No job assistance

And then there's always

Doing it your damn self:

• Free minus opportunity costs
• Minimum 12 weeks, probably closer to a year.
• Tons of resources, harder to find peers for support.
• No application process.
• Can go from 0-90% pretty easily I think. Last 10% would be hard.
• Placement rate unknown, but it's not a full time commitment.

I still have to answer some questions about these options before I decide which to pursue.

How do people support themselves while attending these programs? The fellowships only admit PhDs, who are old enough that they can be expected to have families (fun facts: the average new physical sciences PhD is 30.1 years old [source]. A 30-year old has on average something like 1 child [not quite applicable source]).

Can I find a job where I can learn these skills as I go? Maybe an internship? It probably wouldn't cover all of the bases, but it might be a start.

What are my chances of getting a fellowship? Most likely pretty bad if I were to apply right now. Deadlines are coming up in a month, so I might be able to build an impressive portfolio before then if I dedicate myself to it.

What do the reviews look like? Are there obvious scams? Do they not really teach you anything you couldn't learn just as easily by yourself?

Are there other options I'm not aware of? Cheaper or faster programs at a college or university? Online certifications with similar placement rates?

Need to keep digging.

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A comprehensive list of options like this can be found here.

- b