
Introduction
Verbal and written communication skills are keys to landing any job. I believe these skills are particularly important in technical careers such as data science and programming. You can be the most talented Data Scientist in the world, but if you cannot communicate your models and analyses effectively, nobody will be interested.
Every interview process will have at least a behavioral component to it where you will have to describe different stories in your life that make you a good fit for the role and the company. Additionally, most data science and programming positions include technical components to the interview process where you have to describe your process and results to solving a problem similar to ones you will solve in the position. To land these types of jobs, you need to effectively describe events in your life and your thought process for solving problems.
I am not saying that developing your skills to effectively program, analyze data, and build models is not important. These skills are required for landing technical roles in data science as well. The good news is, there are thousands of free and paid resources for developing these technical skills.
From my experience, the difference between technical and communication skill development is that the latter requires significantly more repetitions to master. You cannot just watch a course on communication and instantly be a better communicator. These courses may give you effective tools to improve, but you need to then apply them multiple times to learn how to use them with your own personality and style of communicating.

I am a Senior at the University of Pennsylvania concentrating in statistics and finance for my undergraduate degree and receiving a master’s degree in data science. I will be graduating in May of 2021 with a Technical Analyst role at Wayfair where I will be analyzing marketing data.
As someone who would consider myself very introverted, it has taken a lot of energy to develop my ability to communicate effectively. I have spent the past four years of my College experience working on developing as an effective communicator. I would now consider explaining technical information to non-technical stakeholders to be one of my greatest strengths. My goal with this article is to describe my process and journey to help you understand a potential path to take to develop this important skill.
Developing Technical Communication Skills
Similar to developing any other skill, getting as many opportunities to practice as possible will lead to the best results. If you are looking to land a job in data science or any technical role, you need to practice effectively communicating technical information.
I knew during my Sophomore year that I wanted to work in this type of role after I graduated. At the time, I was not very comfortable describing statistics and computer science concepts even to my classmates. I would be nervous whenever my professors were looking to cold call a student as I wasn’t confident in my ability to effectively communicate the answer.
To get more comfortable with this, I applied to become a tutor for an intro statistics course (and later an intro computer science course). I knew that I understood the concepts and just had to work on actually communicating them.
This led to 10, 1-hour tutoring sessions each week where I had the opportunity to practice communicating technical information. These sessions were all for just two different courses. This gave me the chance to iteratively improve how I communicated the same topic to multiple students. I would look for feedback in terms of how much each student understood by the end of the session and try to improve my approach for the next session.
I found that these introductory courses gave me the opportunity to speak with students who had no prior exposure to the topics. This was a perfect opportunity for me to develop my ability to communicate to non-technical audiences (a critical skill for technical roles).
During my summers, I worked in a similar role as a Teaching Assistant for a program run by my university where we taught high school students introductory statistics and computer science concepts in the context of sports.

By the time I was interviewing for full-time positions, I was very comfortable explaining this type of information. During multiple interview processes, I was asked to analyze data and present my findings to a non-technical employee. Those presentations went very well and I felt very comfortable during them.
If you are not in college and do not have the opportunity to apply for a teaching assistant or tutoring position, there are plenty of options available to develop this skill. You can start a YouTube channel or write blog articles where you talk about something technical. You can also just talk to a friend or family member about these topics. If you are interested in the topic, I’m sure they would love to hear you talk about it.
Repetitions are very important for developing your ability to communicate (especially technical information). They allow you to iteratively improve and master these necessary skills. Your practice doesn’t have to be anything groundbreaking. I spoke to just 10 students a week and experienced significant improvement rather quickly.
Developing Skills in Communicating with Recruiters
Another important skill is your ability to talk to recruiters and interviewers. Getting comfortable in these settings is a skill that can also be developed only through repetitions. There’s no other way to replicate that nervous feeling you get when you start having a conversation with an interviewer for a position you’re really interested in.

Start applying to jobs now. The only way to practice interviewing is to actually interview. You can (and should) practice working through cases and technical questions as much as possible, but you will not be able to develop the skill of interviewing fully without interviewing. Delaying this process until you have gotten through every case question and have the perfect resume will hold you back from developing.
You can also practice this skill by going to career fairs. Career fairs allow you to talk to a bunch of different recruiters in quicker, less high-stakes conversations. If the conversations don’t go well, there are not really any negative consequences and if they go well, you have just built a connection with a recruiter. I started going to these during my freshman year when I was not even planning on applying to internships for the following summer.
At these career fairs, I had some very awkward conversations with recruiters and some very insightful ones that led me to ultimately apply to and love companies like Wayfair (where I will be working after graduation). The key is to come prepared with a quick introduction about yourself (what year you are, what you study, what position you are interested in, etc.) and some questions about the company and the role. These are two components of any behavioral interview and you have the opportunity to practice with hundreds of recruiters who want to talk to you.
One final way to practice these skills is to reach out to people who work in positions you are interested in at companies you are interested in. You can ask them if they have a few minutes to talk to you about how they got to where they are now. A lot of people are happy to talk to you about how they have succeeded and to help you. A lot of people also are not. Don’t sweat the rejections or lack of responses. Many people are just busy and don’t have a ton of time to talk. It’s always worth asking if you are interested.
By my senior year, I felt significantly more confident when I was talking to interviewers, particularly during the behavioral interviews. Most of them just felt like conversations (which they are) and less stressful. During my first few interviews sophomore year, I was significantly more rigid and uncomfortable. Interviewers want to just have a conversation with you. Practicing talking to them helps you have that conversation.

Conclusion
I do not think the ways that I developed my skills to effectively communicate technical information or to be comfortable talking with interviewers are the only ways to do it. However, I do know that getting focused repetitions is the only way to improve at communicating.
It’s impossible to understand everything about data science and programming. That’s is why we love the field. There is always an opportunity for growth and learning. Similarly, it is impossible to be a perfect communicator. We always have a chance to develop this skill and it can be a process we enjoy. That’s why I am always looking for new opportunities to develop (like starting to write on Medium a few days ago).
A lot of development in this skill requires feeling uncomfortable, a necessary step for growth. Embrace it. As you practice more, things that made you uncomfortable will no longer feel uncomfortable.
Communication is an unavoidable step in all interviewing processes. Don’t overlook it. We can get bogged down in practicing cases and technical coding problems on LeetCode and forget to develop this skill as well.
Rejection is an inevitable part of the recruiting process, especially during this time. Rejection is just another repetition that helps you improve in the process. If you are talented enough, you will find something eventually. Just keep working at it and learning.
Thank you for taking your time to read this article. Best of luck in the recruiting process.