Career Goals

Ideal Position Description:

The job “Data Analyst [1]” provided by TikTok company meets my future career goals very well.

First of all, TikTok, a subsidiary corporation of ByteDance which is a famous Internet company in China, aims to provide users with a great short-form mobile video platform, inspire creativity, and bring joy [1]. Nowadays, TikTok, with more than 500 million active users by the end of 2019, has become one of the fastest-growing social media applications in the world [2].

As for this position, it requires analysts to turn data into understandable information, provide managers with good insights and clear data-driven reports, and finally guide accurate and effective decision makings [1]. Moreover, it prefers applicants who work well with large data sets and distributed computing, can use R and Python, are bilingual in English and Chinese, etc.  [1].

[1] TikTok, “Data Analyst,” January 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1749185690/.

[2] M. Mohsin, “10 TikTok Statistics That You Need to Know in 2020 [Infographic],” 22 Nov 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.oberlo.com/blog/tiktok-statistics.

My Reflection on the Ideal Position:

Personally, the reasons why I aspire to this position can be discussed from three aspects, my favorite industry, my major, and the enterprise culture.

First of all, I believe that the Internet industry is a dynamic and energetic industry with a great deal of fresh and interesting things, like TikTok. It produces numerous valuable real-time data that remains to be analyzed and excavated, which exactly matches my interest in modeling. For example, we can investigate the preference of each user for the contents on TikTok to guide managers to make decisions and provide users with favorite content and proper advertisements.

Besides this, my major, data analytics engineering, pursues to apply the technologies and methodologies of data mining, statistical modeling, optimization and visualization to data-driven decision-making, which is exactly the goal for this position. Therefore, this major also covers all required skills for this position, like SQL, R, Python, data mining, MapReduce, and Hadoop.

As for the enterprise culture, TikTok is a global social media application that comes from China. Therefore, not only does it have a broad international vision but also the Chinese traditional enterprise atmosphere, even it prefers bilingual applicants in English and Chinese. Hence, this position will provide me with a great experience in a company with both global and Chinese background.

Based on the discussion above, I believe that this position aligns with my future career goals very well. Firstly, it satisfies both my interest and major, which will motivate me to accumulate a great deal of experience in this industry and be a better and better data analyst. Another important reason is that I would like to develop my future career in China and this position has a good background to balance the relationship between western and eastern cultures.

Appendix (Job Details):

TikTok, “Data Analyst,” January 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1749185690/.

 

Job Title: Data Analyst    Job Type: Full-Time    Location: Culver City, California

Job Description

We are looking for a passionate Data Analyst who will turn data into understandable information, able to deliver clear goal-drive data reports to each Manager, leading to good insight that will help with accurate and effective business decisions. Come and help us grow out TikTok community!

Responsibilities

  • Find actionable strategic insights through funnels, cohort analyses, user segmentation, retention analyses and regression models to help us grow our products
  • Partner with the product, data and marketing teams to answer high-priority strategic questions
  • Define KPIs, build automated dashboards, reports, and models to help teams make faster better decisions
  • Work with engineering and product to implement, qa, and monitor our logging and metrics
  • Regularly report findings and ongoing KPI’s to marketing to provide visibility into campaign performance and assist in campaign optimization

Requirements

  • BA/BS in Computer Science, Math, Economics, Statistics, or other quantitative fields
  • 4+ years work experience doing quantitative analysis
  • Ability to synthesize and communicate complex concepts and analyses in easy to understand ways
  • A solid grasp of common statistical methods and applications (A/B testing, probability, regression)
  • Expert experience pulling large and complex data using SQL
  • Experience with a data visualization tool (e.g. Mode Analytics/Chartio/Tableau)
  • Familiarity with web analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics/Adobe Analytics/Amplitude)
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills
  • Self-motivated, detail-oriented, learn autonomously, and highly organized

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with marketing analytics (e.g. Attribution/Forecasting)
  • Experience working with very large data sets and distributed computing (Hive/Hadoop/MapReduce)
  • Familiarity with R or Python is a plus
  • Ability to approach problems creatively and build structure out of ambiguous requests
  • Bilingual English-Chinese (Mandarin) a plus