TL;DR

An approach to landing a machine learning opportunity by utilizing your Machine Learning knowledge and practice in ways other's might not have thought about.

Pre-requisites

• You are someone who is driven by passion and wants to show the world out there that "You Can Do It"
  • That's all you need !

Are you a Beginner or a Seasoned Professional?

The rapid change in the trends is often hard to catch up with (Beginners can relate) and due to which usually it harder to keep up with the idea of whether they want to be a Data Scientist, a Machine Learning Engineer or someone else!

Just Getting Started ?

If you're a beginner you will firstly need to practice your skills in your domain and this can be done by various approaches such as,

• Practicing you coding skills on platforms like hackerRank, leetCode and codeChef, etc.
• Re-Implementing Machine Learning algorithms from scratch using Numpy,Pandas, etc.
• Making real world projects using datasets that are publicly available to work with on websites such as Kaggle.com, Google Dataset Repo, etc.

The Real Talk

Many of these are offers that were mentioned by professionals of the industry who have spent 10+ years in the domain of Business Analytics and Fortune 500 companies. these are some off-the-beaten-path options to consider, when looking for a first job, a new job or extra income by leveraging your machine learning experience.

Before moving Forward

Following are some things that a person should adopt in any case as these are not just recommendations but experience that will help you in the long run!

• Starting off is the importance of growing your network and visibility to thousands of people, whether it is by Linked-in ( preferred) or by Instagram,Twitter, or some other platform where you can be a part of communities that have professionals in them.

• Build a portfolio to show the world your accomplishments and the projects you've done along with code that you posted on GitHub, etc.

• Write blogs (Technical or non Technical depending upon your interest) and show others by guiding them about what you know and be a beacon of guidance for the new comers (and sometimes even professionals 😉)

If you do it right, after a while, you will never have to apply for a job ever again; hiring managers and other opportunities will come to you, rather than the other way around because Exposure is the key!

For Beginners in Search

If you're in the beginners division, i suggest that you go with this way:

• One approach is to start Participating in Kaggle and other competitions and showing off your skills (This could be in the form of a team OR one man army!😉)

• Become a teacher for one of the many online teaching companies or data camps, such as Coursera, Gurru99, dphi and many others.

• Start Writing, self-publishing, and selling your own books!

  One example is Jason Brownlee who found his niche by selling tutorials explaining data science in simple words, to software engineers.

• Another option is to develop an API, for instance to offer trading signals (buy / sell) to investors, who pay a fee to subscribe to your service much like a SaaS approach!

• Or Maybe create a website where recruiters can post data science job ads for a fee you need to aggregate jobs from multiple websites, build a large mailing list of data scientists, and charge a fee only for featured jobs. Many of these ideas require that you promote your services for free, using social media.

  This is the hard part: A starting point is to create and grow your own groups on social networks. All this can be one while having a full-time job at the same time.

• You can also become a contributor/writer for various news outlets, though initially you may have to do it for free. But as you gain experience and notoriety, it can become a full time, lucrative job. And finally, raising money with a partner to start your own company (Sounds good right!)

Not a Beginner? No Problem. I got you covered!

The Pro's Division can start by offering consulting services, especially to your former employers to begin with.

NOT Enough? (hehe) don't worry there are other many things that you can do to get some good bucks as a side income

• Become an Expert Witness and get paid by big law firms to show up in court and help them win big money for their clients (and for themselves, and you along the way.) Or you can work for a company specializing in statistical litigation such as wecker.com

• Become a part-time independent recruiter as some machine learning recruiters are former machine learning experts. And Guess What? You can still keep your full-time job.

• Help Venture Capital companies do their due diligence on startups they could potentially fund, or help them find new startups worthy to invest in.

• Get yourself involved in patent reviews (pertaining to machine learning problems that you know very well.) wouldn't that be fun!

Obviously there are of course plenty of other opportunities, such as working for a consulting firm or governments to uncover tax fraudsters via data mining techniques, just to give an example.

Another idea is to obtain a realtor certification if you own properties, to save a lot of money by selling yourself without using a third party. And use your analytic acumen to buy cheap and sell high at the right times. And working from home in (say) Nevada, for an employer in the Bay Area, can also save you a lot of money.

There can be other options as well but i guess this is a good starting point if one is looking to get started with some side hustles as a seasoned personal.

NOTE: Let me know in the feedback section if you have any other ideas!