Go to grad school for data science. Many institutions offer 1 year grad school programs e.g. North Carolina State University offers a 1 year program, not sure if online coursing available, but with about a 90% hire rate. Had a friend who went through the program and now works for Home Depot as a data analyst within 1.5 years from quitting work as a civil engineer
has lots of articles that you can read on the subject.
Python, mentioned on the home page of kdnuggets.com is one of many languages with machine learning and data science applications, and it's FREE! Anaconda is a very popular implementation
Given the relatively low entry fee ($0), you might consider learning on your own, working specific problems to see if that's what you really want to do.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
This "gold rush" started few years ago already. I wonder how long this is going to last?
Is a temporary bubble (say 5 year horizon) or is it backed by solid fundamentals (economic / job market wise) in such case personal investment or career switch would be justified, especially coming from relatively remote discipline?
Guess there is an interesting article (IEA) on digital economy trends and the impacts on energy use:
It is established that the energy supply is contracting and there are various reasons behind this, including:
- Fossil fuels are now depleting and we do not have a replacement yet;
- Nuclear projects will continue to be facing big challenges, in addition the lead time is very long and projects require huge capital investments; lot of know-how has been lost as the closing of many plants has decimated this industry is some regions (for example in France where it is going to be hard to get this expertise back).
- What is the real/true cost of renewable when fossil fuels (cheap energy) are taken out of the equation.
So my question here (open debate): will the digitalisation industry see a contraction when the energy will unavoidably collapse?
Just a quick highlight from the quoted article:
Beyond the next five years, providing credible assessments of energy use by digital technologies is extremely difficult. Direct energy use over the long run will continue to be a battle between data demand growth versus the continuation of efficiency improvements.
On another aspect of the OP question, I think the real question is not how to make the switch; it is how to differentiate and have an edge on a job market that has already gained maturity and is already highly competitive.
Maybe. I do not mind the idea but here is where I come from:
Seems to me that such a career switch question has been replied too efficiently and that worries me.
Let me make an analogy: A doctor treats the decease but he is taking care of a patient.
The OP is a mechanical engineer, so before we give them a prescription to do a big surgery and some valuables are lost for good, I think we need to understand the OP antecedents and OP needs to make sure they know what they are up to / signing for...
I went from hard engineering with a Mechanical degree to Engineering Software, but that was 40 years ago when the industry was young and fresh and what they needed most were people who actually understood how engineers were going to be using software in the future. In many ways, I was lucky, I had just enough real world experience to make what I knew valuable to the software companies and yet I was still young enough that I could learn the new tricks of an industry that hadn't even existed when I was in engineering school.
