How to find work as a new data science grad?
How do employers or employees find the right fit when there are so many options out there and we need to choose a single one?
Happy New Year everyone. Welcome to 2025. It’s crazy how quickly the last year passed by. I’m looking at my post history, and I didn’t even post since I started my Master’s in September 2023. I’m starting to see the end of it now, and I want to get my thoughts down before I’m done and start to forget what it’s like to be in school.
I’m fortunate to be leading an AMOD-52601 workshop once a week. This is a communications workshop for Applied Modelling and Quantitative Methods students. I find that one of the big questions that comes up from graduate students in this course is around when to start looking for a job, where to look, and how to find work.
There are two parts to the answer. One part is around which employers are hiring and what they are hiring for. The other part is a personal question, about what kinds of work we as individuals want to do.
Who’s hiring? What are they hiring for?
I’m going to take a shot at the employment part, if for no other reason than that it’s easier. Practically, employers hire for a role that has specific work that needs to be done. They see a set of tasks that need to be done, and they hire for that. One of my favourite resources for finding job postings is the Kanata North Business Association website. The KNBA is one of the largest tech parks in Canada, and a whole bunch of large companies work there. If you scroll down and click on their Discover Jobs button, you’ll be redirected to a page that has thousands of job postings.

So, short answer? Employers hire for the very practical reason that there is work that needs to be done, and they need someone to do it. That’s where you come in. If you are looking for a job, you are going to try to persuade one of the people who posted the job that you can do the work to the standard that they need. And if you are the only person who applies, this might be enough. The job poster gets someone who can do the work. You get work that is in your field and that you naturally enjoy. Sounds like a win-win.
This gets a bit more complex when we start to add more employers and more job candidates. I remember when I used to hire for Longworth Dental, I would be lucky to get 20 resumés, and I could easily trim it down to the top 3. Now, with the big employment sites and one-click job applications, there is no limit to how many candidates can apply. The last time I tried to hire on a big site, I saw 200 candidates within 24 hours. It becomes very difficult for everyone involved to know what constitutes a “real” applicant. On the employer side, how many of those applicants actually know the company? Putting aside the question of money (everyone applying wants to get paid, no one is going to work for free), how many actually have an interest in the kind of work the company does? One the candidate side, is this a good employer? Do they consider that employees also have a life outside of work? Do they make people work outside of normal work hours? Can an employee take an actual vacation?
So, the long answer is, employers want someone who can do the work well enough, and who can hit as many of the other accessory skills as possible: are they easy to work with? Do they submit work on time? Are they able to get along with the rest of the team most of the time? When they inevitably say that something won’t work, how right are they? And they want to filter this down from hundreds or thousands of candidates to just one as quickly as possible.
Candidates want to know that a job is a real job, and not simply posted to hit someone’s job posting quota. They want to know that they have a future in this role: either it’s the kind of job that will allow them to move up in the company, or it will build their skillset so that they can move on to somewhere that’s a better fit after.
What kind of work do we want to do?
That’s a summary of the employer’s side. For the person looking for work, there is another set of questions we get to ask ourselves, around the kinds of people we like to work with and the kind of work we like to do. And that’s something that needs to be experienced—it gets learned on the job, not by reading books or writing down plans.
My first profession was in teaching. My technical skillset was in math and computer science, and the trade I wanted to learn was teaching: how to build engaging courses, how to align a group of students around a task, how to build feedback loops so that I could become better at what I do.
It took years for me to decide that I didn’t want to work in a classroom anymore. It wasn’t a single decision. I loved teaching. It just no longer worked for me or my family: we had three growing kids and a growing business, and something had to give. That thing was work.
With a bit of distance from that time, I think that many of us have a starter career, something that is a pretty good fit for what we like to do. And then we gradually discover what works for us and what doesn’t. For example, I like to write, I like to work with people, I like to fix things, I love to do math and code. And I value getting a balance of all of those things. Having just one of them doesn’t work.
As an extension of that, I like to work in small businesses, not large ones. Large organizations tend to specialize, they tend to build up bureaucracy and red tape. They get really good at doing one thing, and they build systems that keep that one thing going and make it difficult to shift away. It’s not something that works for me.
Once you have that first job, start to identify the things that work well for you and the things that don’t. Get good at what you do, and find enjoyment in it. Also, listen to the voice that guides you toward the things that you find interesting.
The full name of the course is “Information Literacy and Communication in Data Science”. Trent University’s full course listing can be found here.