Advancing in your career doesn’t always have to mean moving into management. For those who want to keep their hands in coding and data on a daily basis, Giri Tatavarty, vice president of data science at retail data and analytics company 84.51°, recommended investigating if your company has a technical track for career advancement. Those pursuing such an option can grow as individual contributors and basically become technical specialists.

“These experts typically spend more of their time actually developing the skill and techniques and experimenting, than managing people or working with the other other responsibilities of a typical management job,” Tatavarty said.

Tatavarty has pursued this technical track himself and is a senior individual contributor at 84.51°. He described his average day as being 30 percent to 40 percent working on innovative projects he leads and 20 percent to 30 percent on conducting reviews of projects being led by others on the team. The rest of the time is spent working on strategizing for the technical vision of the company, like determining the best strategy for scalable data science methods.

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