💪 Skill Stacking
Good morning friends! ☀️
We have all survived the first month of 2024 and I hope everyone’s New Year resolutions are still going strong. Although, I am sure more people are happy that dry January is over! 🍻
Earlier this week I read the article: “Why (and How) I Learned Web Development as a Data Scientist” by
. Matt is a data science-based writer and entrepreneur from Oxford. We have spoken a few times and his writing is excellent. You can check his blog here and newsletter .In the article, Matt explains how he learned Web Development as a Data Scientist. For those unfamiliar with these tech buzzwords, Data Scientists analyze data, deploy models, and generally help businesses from a purely data and statistical perspective. However, Web Development is normally under the Front-End Engineer role and is all about building websites.
One particular idea struck a chord with me, which was “skill-stacking.” Indeed defines skill-stacking as
“Skill stacking is the concept that individuals can make themselves more valuable by gaining a wide range of skills instead of pursuing one skill or talent”
It’s best to learn new skills that crossover and complement your existing knowledge. Data science and Web Development is a great example, as you have programming knowledge from data science that you can improve through Web Dev whilst learning new things such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The Web Dev side will improve your software engineering knowledge through understanding domains and building api's.
Another example is being a content creator. You need to write, present well, edit videos, be good on social media, and have great time management skills.
No matter what industry or job you are in, there will at least one adjacent skill that you can learn that would be of benefit to you.
Matt’s article inspired me so much that I started to learn some Web Dev myself, to build my website! It probably won’t be that good at the beginning, but it all a learning process.
So, considering we are in the second month of 2024, is there any skill you can add to your repertoire this year that will complement your existing knowledge?
What’s Been Cooking 🥘
Some tasty stories this week:
AI Stocks Drop — AI companies lost $190 billion on the stock market after Microsoft’s, Google’s, and Advanced Micro Devices’s quarterly earnings report didn’t wow investors.
Altman Vista South Korea For Chip Collaboration — Sam Altman visited South Korea to discuss a potential collaboration between OpenAI with Samsung and SK Group for specialized AI chips.
First Human With Neuralink — Musk announced this week that his implantable brain–computer company, Neuralink, has had its first implant on a human patient.
Weekly Favourites ❤️
🗞️ Newsletter —
. A colleague of mine recently started this newsletter all about engineering platforms and how to make them effective. It’s very different from the "normal" tech newsletters that mainly revolve around software engineering or AI, so I highly recommend it to learn some things not in your immediate remit!🗞️ Newsletter —
. Another terrific data science newsletter by the best DS writers on Medium, . I have enjoyed the recent editions, learning something new each time, which is more than I can ask for from a newsletter!🎬 YouTube — QuantPy. Cool YouTube channel giving tips on using Python for quantitative finance. I am not too keen on becoming a quant, mainly because the hours don’t sound ideal, but the theory and modeling part sounds very interesting. I remember doing some geometric Brownian motion back at University to model stock returns and I enjoyed the project.
(PS: Some links are affiliate links that I get a kickback from with no extra cost to you 😎)
Love it, thanks Egor! You’ve explained skill stacking so much better than I ever have - I’ve linked to this substack post in my next TDS article! :-)
Thanks for the mention Egor! Really enjoyed the issue 😊