How do we know if we're being affected by imposter syndrome? How do we start to work on removing those doubts from our work life? This week on Would You Data Scientist, Wendy is joined by Data Science & Analytics Leader at MarketFinance, Mike Holmes. Hear Mike's story of dealing with imposter syndrome, his work in data, his thoughts on improving diversity, and how one of the first things he had to learn was 2+2.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Imposter syndrome is loosely defined as doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud. It disproportionately affects high-achieving people, who find it difficult to accept their accomplishments. Many question whether they're deserving of accolades.
• Dunning-Kruger effect, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general.
• One of Mike's best tips to getting over imposter syndrome is to tackle one problem at a time. Break the big problems down into smaller manageable tasks. Don't feel overwhelmed by them, anyone can take it one step at a time.
• When you're starting out in data science, Mike's advice is to learn how to do one thing and do it well instead of trying to learn everything at once. This way you know the process of how to learn new things in the field.
• As a team, Mike believes it helps for some people to have PHDs, this is just to increase the diversity of the group. But as an individual, it doesn't matter.
• Assumptions and limitations are important to note down early on in the process. You can then refer back to it to make sure that the outcome doesn't have bias built into it.

BEST MOMENTS

'It delivered a huge impact to our customers, what more could you want than that?'

‘You're not going to progress in life if you don't do the things that are a bit scary'

‘Job titles can be misleading'

‘What skills are we missing? How do we make the team stronger?'

EPISODE RESOURCES

Mike on LinkedIn

VALUABLE RESOURCES

linkedin.com/in/ethicalrecruiter

qwerkrecruitment.com

@qwerkrec on socials

ABOUT THE GUEST

Mike is a commercially astute data and analytics leader, specialising in predictive modelling and credit risk management, and has a broad knowledge across data science, business intelligence and data architecture principles. Over his career, Mike has embedded over 60 models, enterprise-wide, which have made millions of decisions across over £70bn of assets.

ABOUT THE HOST

Wendy Gannon started Qwerk Recruitment in the middle of the Covid Pandemic to disrupt the recruitment sector with ETHICAL data recruitment and treat everyone with love, dignity and respect. Avid Music photographer of 15 years.

PODCAST DESCRIPTION

Interviewing successful Data Scientists to find out about their journey into Data Science and any struggles they've faced to help next generation Data Scientists from all walks of life to access their dream career.

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