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My transition from Professional Archaeology to Data Science

As I was saying, after some of the responses received on this comment, I am explaining a bit how my transition was. This is just my personal experience and opinion, so take it with a grain of salt, and feel free to disagree on the comments.

I am originally Spanish, and I did a BSc in archaeology (4 years) in Spain years ago (I know European university programmes are different from the US ones, so I am not sure how that translates to America University studies). During that studies, I did a lot of work about statistics applied to archaeology, and I had a couple of courses about that (R, statical modelling, hypothesis testing, etc...). I moved to the UK and worked as professional archaeologist (CRM I think is called in America) for five years, until the pandemic, when I decided I wanted to leave the fieldwork.

Then, I went back to the university, and started a BSc in Data Science ( 3 years distance learning, at the Open University), to have a deeper mathematical and statistical knowledge, and fill many gaps on my knowledge. I participate in a mentoring programme at The Data Lab (https://thedatalab.com) too, where I had a couple of wonderful mentors that helped me to understand how the data landscape looked like, and how to change my CV (resume) for said field. On my second year on the BSc, I started to applied to positions, and I got hired on a small organisation, and six months later I got hired in a much bigger company (as a part of a decent size data team). And I have been working in data for 4 years now, being my role now Senior Data Analyst.

In the UK, the terms Data Analyst, Business Analyst, or Business Intelligence analyst, are (were) usually the data starting point. For recruiters and some organisations, it is not really clear the distinction between data analyst, scientist and engineer, and many companies see that like a career path, but being honest each of these positions have different goals and approaches. If you think that you don't have enough mathematical, computing or statistical knowledge, in many occasions those positions doesn't require really advanced technical skills (and that is something that can be learnt). Until recently, for many companies, their "database" is a folder full of old Excel files, and if you are lucky an SQL server somewhere. The real skill is to understand the requirements and user needs, and being able to get the data, and produce something that can be useful for them, because frequently they don't know what they really need, and/or the challenges to get and interpret the answer.

For those worried about AI, being honest, I am not sure how it is affecting the data job market at the moment, and. I have heard that is more challenging to get starting positions, but I don't really know is that is true or not. For me, at the moment, it is a tool that allows me to get the data faster. But I still have to understand the user needs, get the data, produce the report, and give them what they need to answer whatever questions they have. Doesn't matter too much if I do that coding SQL by hand, or chatting with Claude. What makes the difference between myself and the final user doing that is the understanding and knowledge about the data structure and schema, the different definitions, design choices, etc... and some of the soft skills we have as archaeologist can be transferable (and soft skills are much harder to learn in a position and to be substituted by AI). My general advice would be rewrite your resume to do it more data focus if possible, maybe work a bit in a portfolio (dashboards, reports, analysis), not too focused in statistics but more in analysis.

And some final thoughts about archaeology and fieldwork. If you have tried digging, and you don't feel like that is for you, I would like to mention that digging is just one part of it, and if you don't like it, there are many other areas that are still archaeology. I was lucky to be in the international CAA conferences last month (the computer applications in Archaeology), and you can see many, many archaeological projects that are purely statistics and or computing. Maybe you are right, and it is not for you (fair enough) but maybe there are some areas that can be interesting for you. In addition, you can always earn your money (gain your chickpeas, as we say in Spain) in other place, and keep research as an academic hobby. For example, if everything goes well, I am starting a PhD in Archaeology next September, but I am not thinking of changing professional career again, at least not for now.