Hey,
My job title at a club in Scotland was Data Analyst.
I was the first data analyst in the recruitment team, and there were only three of us in the department, so we were building everything from scratch.
I was using APIs to get the data in and clean it, I was building our own player rating model and the visualisation tools the recruitment team used, and I was answering their questions, building shortlists and going out to watch players live.
On a job advert, that's three different jobs with some scouting on top. Getting the data in and cleaning it is what a data engineer does. Building the model and the tools is a data scientist's job. And answering the recruitment team's questions is the analyst.
You'll have seen those three titles over and over on adverts, and it probably feels like you need to pick one of them and go all in. I don't think you do.
At the big clubs each of those is its own role, with dozens of recruitment staff and full-time scouts around the world. In League Two it might just be you, and if you're lucky you'll have one other person to work with.
This week's YouTube video covers this whole topic. Click here to watch or click the video image below.
The same thing happened when I applied for my job at the agency.
The task sat across data engineering and data science, scraping data from a website, cleaning it and putting it in a database, and that's not my background. I cobbled some code together, and honestly it wasn't the best task I've ever done.
In the interview I talked about its limitations, and about my experience in scouting, recruitment analysis and performance analysis.
They ended up hiring two people: a very technical data engineer to do the hard technical work, and me, as a data analyst who could use those tools, work across recruitment and performance and help their clients.
So I think the one choice that does matter is the route you want to go down.
Do you want to make the team better to win at the weekend, which is performance analysis, or do you want to find the players who'll improve the team, which is recruitment?
I did performance first, didn't enjoy it that much and moved across to recruitment, which a lot of people do, so it doesn't lock you in.
Once you've picked a route, build the skills around it.
If I wanted to be a recruitment analyst, I'd get experience pulling my own data and cleaning it, putting it into a database, making visualisations and building a simple player rating model, and going to live games and doing video scouting.
Technically most of that isn't the recruitment analyst's job, but you'll need it when you go for roles, especially lower down the pyramid.
You don't have to be world class at everything.
If you can build a broad skill set that helps the people making decisions answer their questions and makes their lives easier, that's really the job of anyone who works with data in football.
Liam
The Recruitment Room covers all of this
From scouting and analysis to Python and building your portfolio, and you can send everything you make for feedback from me, the mentors and the members.
I'm already having calls for our January intake. Apply now, and if it's a good fit you'll be first in line when the doors open at the end of January.
→ Apply for January