This Wednesday at 10am I will be hosting a webinar with Philip Morgan on Positioning Your Data Science Portfolio.
If you are interested in creating a Data Science Portfolio that positions you as an expert in your field, then I encourage you to attend.
I had been developing a portfolio for a few years before learning about “positioning”. If you had asked me at the time, I would have said that I wanted my portfolio to highlight my open source projects.
The portfolio did that job well. But unfortunately, it wasn’t having a significant impact on my career. These days I see a lot of Data Science portfolios that have a similar problem.
In January 2016 I had to make a decision: either find a way to make this “open source thing” work, or go back to a “real” job.
I joined a business development program called Double Your Freelancing Clients to help me figure this out. That’s where I met Philip Morgan. He encouraged me to put a sentence like this on the top of my homepage:
I help <audience> with <problem>.
That’s all that a positioning statement is.
For many people, positioning is harder than it sounds.
In my case, picking one audience with one problem meant giving up something important.
One the one hand, I had a lot of experience working as a software engineer at venture-backed startups in San Francisco.
But going forward, I really wanted to work with R, Maps and Open Data. But I was new to that field, and couldn’t articulate what companies would be interested in the skills I was developing.
And here’s the rub: Positioning requires picking just one audience and just one problem. With Philip’s help, I chose the positioning statement “I help R programmers map open data sets”. I also removed all references to my past jobs from my website.
The results were fantastic. By focusing on such a small niche I was able to become top of mind when people were actively searching for help in this field.
Even better, the quality of conversations I had with people started to improve. Rather than treating me as one of dozens of people they were interviewing for a job, people were now seeking me out for an expert opinion.
Attending this webinar, of course, will not give you similar results overnight.
But I will say this: if you want your portfolio to position you as an expert, and start conversations like the ones I describe above, then you will need to do something more than publish a bunch of analyses online.
This is where positioning can help you. And this is where Wednesday’s webinar can help you.