Junior Data Scientist at a Manchester retailer: a public dashboard analytics directors search for

Four months. Five applications. One offer. The slowest job search I've ever run, and the one I'm most proud of. I was a PhD candidate in statistics in Manchester. I'd been working on my thesis for about two years when I decided I needed to find commercial work. Partly because the funding situation had changed, partly because I'd realised, fairly late, that I wanted to leave academia. I had no commercial experience. I had three published papers, one of which had been cited fifty times in a relatively small sub-field. I'd taught two undergraduate modules. I'd built a small simulation framework in R that nobody other than me used. The CV looked like a CV for a postdoc, not for a junior data scientist. Cold emailing hadn't worked when I'd tried it for a week. I'd sent twelve emails to data teams in Manchester and London and gotten one polite reply. The thing that worked was a public dashboard. I'd been wanting to learn dbt and Streamlit. I picked a topic, UK retail footfall, using publicly available data from one of the data trusts, and built a dashboard over six weekends. It wasn't elegant. It worked. I put it on a free Streamlit hosting tier and tweeted about it once. About two months later the head of analytics at a mid-sized ↓