\u201cI just got lucky\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Ask successful people how they got where they are, and you\u2019ll often hear \u201cI just got lucky.\u201d There\u2019s a nugget of truth in that, but it\u2019s not the full story. Here\u2019s a scenario that never happens: a recruiter spends hours scouring far-flung corners of the internet and randomly turns up your name alongside the word \u201cdataviz\u201d (or some variant thereof), calls around to see if anyone knows you, and somehow finds your info. Almost equally as unlikely is that a recruiter plucks your standard resume out of a stack of similar-looking documents and decides to call you because you had good grades in college or were treasurer of your computing club. That\u2019s not to say you can\u2019t get a job by cold-applying \u2014 the aforementioned element of luck is always at play \u2014 but in my experience, this method has an abysmal success rate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So if all those successful folks just got lucky, why aren\u2019t you getting lucky? Answer: because all of those people maximized their luck<\/em>. Luck still needs fertile ground to manifest, and the more of that environment you cultivate, the better your chances are of capturing some of that luck. If getting your desired job or recognition is like winning the lottery, then joining Indeed and sending out resumes is the equivalent of buying a lottery ticket every week and hoping you\u2019re the lucky winner. But what if you could print 100 lottery tickets per day? A thousand tickets? It might not happen immediately, but now your chances of winning that jackpot are more and more inevitable given time \u2014 you\u2019ve maximized your luck. To understand how this applies to success in dataviz, let\u2019s look at another hypothetical hiring scenario, but this time it\u2019s how (most) people actually get hired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You are consistently producing good work, which you make public and accessible. You have a website and portfolio to showcase this work. You start getting your name out there \u2014 writing blog posts, going to meetups, and interacting with community members through social media. You share your work, people start noticing and sharing it, and all of a sudden you\u2019re \u201cthe woman who made that awesome rap battles visualization.\u201d Then the next time you submit a resume, your name is instantly recognized. Or even more likely, someone who is familiar with your work recommends you for a position. Now with your foot in the door, your thoughtful portfolio will clinch the job for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, this is all easier said than done. Building a good portfolio is deceptively tricky, as is navigating social media. Many of us in the dataviz field are introverts, and self-promotion and networking do not come naturally. But like data analysis or design, these are skills that can be learned. So, based on my own experience, I\u2019ve distilled this process into the most important steps to maximize your luck and convert your visualizations skills into a successful career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dataviz is an inherently visual, medium, so a good portfolio that showcases your work is crucial. If you\u2019re new to the field, you might worry that you don\u2019t have enough work to showcase, but a good portfolio is all about quality over quantity (see: how to build a portfolio without much experience<\/a>). It\u2019s much better to have a portfolio that has one or two really in-depth case studies of projects you\u2019re proud of than a heap of random charts. Here are three guidelines for building the perfect dataviz portfolio:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everyone should have a personal website. This site does not need to be fancy or difficult to maintain \u2014 in fact, the most important thing about the website is that it\u2019s easy for you to update and use. If you\u2019re a coder, you can choose any tech you like (I love static site generators + Netlify), but if not, platforms like WordPress or SquareSpace are equally good options. Don\u2019t sweat too much over the actual tech of the website, as Tom MacWright says in his excellent article How to Blog<\/em><\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere are two things that matter, in terms of blog technology: 1) You own your domain, 2) It works.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Owning your domain not only lends professionalism to your site, but more importantly, it means that it\u2019s your property, and you control the contents. If your site is hosted on my-name.company.com<\/em> and said \u201ccompany\u201d goes bankrupt tomorrow, your content can go with it \u2014 not so when you own your domain. Setting up a custom domain is surprisingly easy: you can buy the domain from any number of web hosting companies (you may have to fiddle around a bit to find an available address to your liking, but it shouldn\u2019t cost more than $10\u2013$50 per year), and then follow the instructions on your website deployment engine (such as Netlify or WordPress) to add the domain to your website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With your site all hooked up, you need to fill in the content with the aforementioned portfolio, a short bio that tells people who you are and what you\u2019re passionate about, and a way for people to contact you. But once that\u2019s all set up, how do you actually get people to look at it? Unfortunately, the phrase \u201cbuild it and they will come\u201d does not apply to websites. The internet is essentially a giant filing cabinet, and your newly-made website is all the way in the back of the bottom drawer. However, the good news is that there are some very effective techniques, covered in the following sections, to point people to your site that will help you build an audience and eventually allow your website to climb closer to the front of the proverbial cabinet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of the good things that have happened in my career are thanks, at least in part, to Twitter. Through Twitter, I have met and built relationships with some of my heroes in the field, gotten speaking engagements, connected with freelance opportunities, built connections which ultimately led to my current job, and most importantly, cultivated a community of friends and peers who have helped and supported me in my learning journey. This is not to say Twitter did all these things for me automatically, rather that it enabled them, by giving me a place to network and promote my work, and allowing me to do so while living in a small town in central Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Regardless of your goals, you will need a forum to share your work \u2014 after all, how will people find that beautiful website you just built if you have nowhere to share it? My platform was Twitter, but there are also large communities on LinkedIn, which is more focused on the business world, and Instagram, which is more focused on the artistic. Navigating social media and building a network can be daunting and often discouraging. When you\u2019re new to a platform you can spend months of even years feeling like you\u2019re shouting into a void. As someone who has gone through these stages of social media development, I can say it gets better, <\/em>and it often accelerates in multiple step changes. Here\u2019s my best advice on how to get over the hump and build a meaningful community on social media:<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you first join a social media community, you may be awed by the endless available resources, but in time, you\u2019ll find that you can be a part of building that library.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m a big believer in blogging. Besides helping others in their own learning journey, here is a sampling of some personal benefits of blogging:<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019re a beginner, you may feel like you have nothing to contribute, but in fact the opposite is true. As a new learner, you\u2019re the person most in-tune with the struggles of the learning process. People that are experts in a field tend to forget what parts of learning were hard and what people really struggle with as beginners. You, on the other hand, are perfectly positioned to write up how you overcame an issue or learned a particularly tricky concept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If blogging is not your thing, there are many other ways you can contribute: video tutorials, open-source software contribution, or sharing code notebooks. And if you\u2019re still not convinced that public work is a critical part of a data-related career, check out this wonderful talk by David Robinson,\u00a0The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Public Work<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cultivating online communities and sharing your work is all vitally important, but eventually it will be time to step into the spotlight and put yourself and your work center stage. In the data visualization world, this happens through conferences, challenges or competitions, and awards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dataviz challenges or competitions \u2014 and the awards that can result from them \u2014 are a great way to network, force yourself to complete a project, and gain notoriety. When I was fairly new to dataviz and learning D3, I saw an announcement on the Data Visualization Society Slack about the VizRisk Challenge. I decided to enter on a whim, and that\u2019s where I ended up building my first real data story. The pressure of the challenge deadline forced me to accelerate my D3 and JavaScript learning, and I ended up producing a story about remotely triggered earthquakes<\/a> that I was extremely proud of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn\u2019t perfect, and the project didn\u2019t win the challenge (though it did win a smaller prize for \u201cbest write-up\u201d), but the work was well received, and in many ways, launched my career. I ended up polishing that initial project and entered it into the Information is Beautiful Awards, where it made the shortlist, and the Pudding Cup, where I was selected as a winner. But in the end, challenges don\u2019t have to just be about winning. I\u2019ve participated in a few other competitions that I haven\u2019t won, but in every case, I\u2019ve met important people, developed meaningful collaborations, and completed projects I was proud of. With some challenges, you may even end up invited to a conference to showcase your work, which brings us to the next way to put yourself in the spotlight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Going to conferences is both intimidating and important. Face-to-face mingling, and the attention you get as a presenter can be crucial for building relationships and landing a job. Through conferences, I have made lasting connections with people I respect, met wonderful collaborators, and even landed my current job from a connection I made at a conference. Conferences have driven a lot of engagement for my own career. If you\u2019re going to a smaller conference (less than 200 people), it\u2019s not necessary to present, and you can make enough connections just from mingling. At larger events, though, you should try to land a presenting role of some type. When you\u2019re starting out, it can be hard to land a full speaker position (though there\u2019s no harm in trying), but it\u2019s much easier to get a poster or lighting talk, and if these smaller presentations go well, it can catapult you to a full talk at future conferences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the beginning of this essay, I told the story of my father getting fired from his first construction job, and eventually overcoming that failure years later when he would design and build multiple houses. Like my father, you will likely face many disappointments in your learning journey and your career: awards you don\u2019t win, contracts you don\u2019t get, and projects you have to abandon. When you fail, it\u2019s important to \u201cfail properly<\/a>.\u201d First, let yourself grieve \u2014 it\u2019s perfectly OK to just be sad and upset. It\u2019s also important to realize that others have been in the exact same spot. If you voice your disappointment to your friends you\u2019ll likely get many replies carrying the essence of, \u201cI\u2019m sorry, I\u2019ve been there, it sucks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, when you\u2019re ready, regroup and evaluate what went wrong and what you can learn from the experience. Sometimes there isn\u2019t, we try our best, and the world is just cruel. But other times, you might get some worthy criticism or evaluate if a project failed because of poor time management or planning. Finally, let go and move on, history will remember your successes far more than your failures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was a nearly 20 year gap between my father getting fired from his first construction job and him building our home. Your personal journey to a rewarding dataviz career will likely not take that long, though at times, it may feel like it is. Developing new skills takes time, and it\u2019s easy to feel like you\u2019re not making progress when you\u2019re just starting and looking at a long road ahead. The only advice I have is to take your process one step at a time, breaking your long-term goals into smaller achievable pieces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If your long-term goal is to become a data visualization developer for a successful company, break that down into smaller stepping-stones (learn D3, improve UX design knowledge, etc.), then keep breaking those down into smaller goals until you\u2019ve arrived at a set of tasks that can be completed in a couple days or a week, like finish week 1 of online D3 course<\/em>, read a chapter of The Design of Everyday Things<\/em>, and write a rough draft of a blog post<\/em>. Without breaking your goals down into manageable pieces, you run the risk of analysis paralysis, where the size of a task becomes so intimidating that you struggle to even begin. There\u2019s several organization apps you can use to manage these goals: I use Notion<\/a> to track and organize my tasks, categorizing them by project, priority, and difficulty. Keep your tracking system simple to ensure that you actually update it, and keep your tasks small to help you maintain momentum by checking a few tasks off each week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If there\u2019s one truth to building a house and a career in data visualization it\u2019s that you can\u2019t make it alone. I\u2019ve mentioned several times throughout this series of essays that you will need to lean on your community during your learning journey and the rest of your career. Communities can be both large and small \u2014 it can encompass the whole of your Twitter-verse, it could be a few choice friends you\u2019ve made through meetups, or it could be a small group of people you\u2019ve met online who share your interests. As your career grows, so will your community. Devote substantial time to community and it will be paid back in multiples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since data visualization is our business, it\u2019s easy to think of this community just as a professional resource, but it can be so much more. A good amount of my social interaction now occurs through my dataviz community and I count many of you among my friends. And it\u2019s no surprise \u2014 after all, we all share an obsessive love for a strange and peculiar subject. When you spend most of your time thinking about and talking about dataviz, it\u2019s easy to forget that this is still a fairly niche interest. The fact that you have methods to connect you to other people that have the same weird obsession is a gift you should cherish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if you\u2019ve put time into your community, when you need help, your friends will be there for you. The same was true for my father building our house; he never could have done it alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Being part of a community is a two-way street. It\u2019s wonderful that so many resources are now available freely to us, but if we only use<\/em> resources and receive<\/em> support from others, then these amazing communities will die. That\u2019s why it\u2019s important to give back<\/em> in some way to the communities that you have benefited from. Creating resources is important to grow a community, but if all you do is create things and ask people to look at them, it makes a community stale, like a bulletin board full of self-promotional fliers. Instead, be an active member of your communities: respond to threads, engage in discussion, give feedback, and promote the work of others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This last point is perhaps the most crucial in this entire essay series. Anyone who gains success has undoubtably benefitted from others promoting their work and helping them in their journey. It\u2019s crucial that as you move up in the world you do the same, pay back that kindness and create a positive cycle of helping others. As you climb the ladder of success, don\u2019t be tunnel-visioned on your own ascent, but instead, reach down and help pull others up \u2014 alone you may survive, but it\u2019s as a community that we thrive.<\/p>\n
\n\n\n\nStep 1: Show your work<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/miro.medium.com\/max\/1400\/1%2AVVPhycLPqeGUd-UmB4wuOQ.png?w=720&ssl=1\")
A place to call home<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Step 2: Make a name for yourself<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/miro.medium.com\/max\/1400\/0%2Akbr2maVt2JwLK0ie.jpg?w=720&ssl=1\")
Create resources and gain exposure<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Step into the spotlight<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/miro.medium.com\/max\/1400\/1%2AE1wEHvWpVWcPQpCiphkgmA.jpeg?w=720&ssl=1\")
Step 3: Maintain your sanity and be patient<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Patience is a virtue<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/miro.medium.com\/max\/1400\/1%2AtIrOWp2DAA_Mu0ytdnDyjg.png?w=720&ssl=1\")
Step 4: Cultivate a community<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Give back to your community<\/h3>\n\n\n\n