I recently had a one-on-one meeting with my manager and I asked this question:

How would I get into management? (If I want to go down that route)

Given my technical background it is a strange question; quite frankly it would probably be to the surprise of some people if I went full management and relinquish all programming at such a young age. My leader gave some extremely simple advice which would apply to any job. It boiled down to something like this:

You basically have to being doing that job before you can get that job

This wasn’t to say that if you were promoted or received a role due to seniority that you were undeserving of it, but rather if you aim to excel at what you do, you must essentially fulfil the job description before you can land that role.

For example, some people without a statistics background would often say:

I want to do predictive modelling

The follow up question is can perform simple linear regression and explain the ANOVA results? Often times it isn’t that someone is preventing you from performing a particular role, it is that you may not have demonstrated that you have the ability. The reality is that you are hoping that others place blind faith on your abilities!

Practical Ideas

Let’s say that you have recently graduated from university and looking for a data analytics role, however you only have R knowledge, but no SAS knowledge. What could you do? Perhaps one of the best ways is to demonstrate that you can clean and manipulate dirty data, as a suggestion perhaps you could provide some code to plot the location of all the Sydney hat restaurants and publish the corresponding R code, describing your methodology. In fact this would be a perfect interview example of demonstrating your technical skills.

How can you manage without being a manager first?

In one simple line; you can’t. You can’t demonstrate that you can manage someone if you’re not a manager. But you can be a mentor, someone who may be slightly more junior to you with whom you can bounce ideas off and discuss strategies to continually improve yourself.

What I hope to achieve

Whether or not I end up in a managerial position does not actually matter. There are still leadership qualities which I can demonstrate and focus on. These include:

  • Chairing meetings, which include co-ordinating and balancing conflicting interests of all members and stakeholders
  • Establishing a clear vision of a project which you are leading and sharing it with everyone
  • Knowledge sharing

These are aspects of leadership which anyone can demonstrate regardless whether you are just an analyst or whether you are in management.