Looking for some inspiration

artvanderlay

Hi,


I'm late 30s and I'm feeling very stuck in a crappy situation. Basically for the past few years I have been a full time carer, but that responsibility is now at an end, and I want to get back to work/education. I mostly worked admin jobs in Dublin before becoming a carer, and since then I finished a 3 year Maths/Stats degree with the Open University. I always had the intention of going on to further study, but because of personal circumstances and responsiblities, I was never able to. Now, I'm coming out of a very long, dark period of my life, and I'm just very short of inspiration. I'm living down in Mayo now (Dublin costs of living were too high), and the job scene is not great here at the moment , especially for the type of admin work I used to do. To be honest, I want to get away from that anyways and aim up. I am poor, but debt free, and I think I would be entitled to free fees (possibly a grant) if I decided to go back and do a masters/hdip. The problem is I don't have a clue what to do with myself: I want to better myself, and being in my late 30s, I would prefer not to go back to doing jobs I was doing in my 20s.



Can anyone suggest some careers and what I should be looking at? I wouldn't mind going back to uni for a year if I knew there was a decent paying job at the end of that, but is that realistic given that I am nearly 40? I'm just venting here a bit; feeling very disillusioned with my situation. Life has been very tough the past few years, and I am very out of the loop with things. Any advice appreciated.

Glinda

There's a Census coming up and the CSO will be looking to hire all kinds of staff to work on it for a year or two. Your qualifications would be very relevant, and they often take on retired people or people looking to return to work after long periods. It's a great way to build up some experience and make contacts - might be worth giving them a call to get some info on when and how they'll be hiring.

artvanderlay

Glinda wrote: »

There's a Census coming up and the CSO will be looking to hire all kinds of staff to work on it for a year or two. Your qualifications would be very relevant, and they often take on retired people or people looking to return to work after long periods. It's a great way to build up some experience and make contacts - might be worth giving them a call to get some info on when and how they'll be hiring.

Thank you. I'll look into that.

OMM 0000

Hey that's wonderful you did a stats/maths degree.

Have you considered looking into machine learning? It's just basic stats with some basic programming skills on top of it.

Having a stats degree will make you more valuable than 80% of people currently doing it.

Learn python programming. You just need the basics.

Tom Dunne

With a maths/stats degree, you would be ideally suited to Data Analytics. They simply can't get enough people in this area.

Machine Learning and AI are also big areas, but I would suggest they need more of a computer science background than data analytics.

OMM 0000

Tom Dunne wrote: »

Machine Learning and AI are also big areas, but I would suggest they need more of a computer science background than data analytics.

I manage a team of machine learning guys, and most of the programming stuff is straightforward. The normal programmers on the team usually take care of any complex stuff (e.g. product integration), while the machine learning guys are mostly dealing with gathering and cleaning any training data, and working with the existing machine learning libraries (which normally requite just a few lines of code to get things working). Very rarely do ML guys have to write any complicated code.

Saying all that, I do know some ML guys who struggle with the code. So it's definitely worth learning Python first to see if you have a brain for programming.

artvanderlay

Thanks for the advice. I have thought about data analytics/programming but to be honest they scare the hell out of me. There's so much to learn, between all the different languages, that I never really know where to begin and I get overwhelmed. I get turned off even looking at code; I just don't get it.



Having said that, I'm going to give Python a go, and realistically if I can't get a handle on it, or don't enjoy it any way, I think I should give those careers a miss. Would that be sensible or would I be giving up too easily?

OMM 0000

I think you have the right attitude.

Give Python a try, and see how you get on.

Actually learning Python is the hard part. The ML libraries, and the concepts behind them, are straightforward.

In fact, if people really understood what ML is doing under the hood, they would be quite unimpressed.

I've been working daily with Python for about 3 years, and it's fine. I prefer JavaScript (there are ML libraries for JavaScript too) but Python is where it's at (currently) for ML.

Get yourself a beginners Python book on Amazon and work through it. Don't get "Fluent Python" or "Learning Python" - both are kind of a drag to read.

And when you're working through the book, remember most ML guys only use the basic aspects of the language - you can forget about generators and other complex topics like that.

Tom Dunne

If you are a maths head, forget about Python and have a look at R.

Joking aside, it might actually make some sense to you and ease you into programming.

I'm a big fan of Python, but it is a general-purpose language (and, I should point heavily used in Data Analytics and ML/AI).

If you are good at mats/stats, you have a head for programming. Nothing to be afraid of.

OMM 0000

Good advice Tom. I always forget about R. Definitely worth looking at.