How to gain a new skill?
How does one go about learning a new skill and gain relevant experience that one can show on their resume when his/her day job is does not involve using that new skill? Online courses are fine but they do not carry enough weightage. They do not expose you to the level of detail/complexities that you see in real life. I'm an embedded software engineer...but want to improve upon my skills in data analysis. I have picked up python, did a couple of courses on Coursera, udemy. Now what? I do not have anything meaningful to show for. How did you guys manage it? Did any of you contribute to open source projects? What is the timeline one has to look at to say I'm reasonably good at this new thing? (Assuming one spends 2-3 hrs after coming home to learn)
I did some analysis on public data sets via data.gov think of some topic you are interested in a play with the data. I wrote a few articles on medium too
You could try Kaggle competitions few of them are challenging and offer good experience
Depends on what you mean by analysis. There are at least a few parts: knowing the right questions to ask, knowing which analysis is most appropriate, and knowing how to apply the analysis.
I gave that as an example...in general how does one beef up a new skill when the day job is completely different?