Ranking High in Kaggle Competition is a Huge Advantage for Job Seekers

For someone who is looking for a job in data analytics field, high rankings in Kaggle Competition will give him tremendous advantage. Employers see the competition winners having strong problem solving skills and hands-on expertise. Indeed, to be able to complete some projects for Kaggle competitions, participants have to put in a lot of effort to deal with data issues even before any predictive models can be built. This is very similar to that in the real world applications where 80% of time is spent on data cleanse and manipulation. It is not a surprise that some employers prefer Kaggle competition winners over PhD graduates whose skills are perceived as more theoretical.

Taking my nephew, Yuyu Zhou, as an example. He got a master degree in data analytics. While he was in school, he spent a few weeks with other classmates to participate in Kaggle competitions. His team has achieved the top 3% and 5% in two Kaggle prediction competitions respectively (see my blog post a Young Data Scientist- Kaggle Competition Top 5% Winner: Yuyu Zhou. Once he graduated, he was quickly hired by a prestigious company and has been earning PhD level salary. Those few weeks he spent on Kaggle Competition was the best time investment of his life.