I would ask your friends with similar jobs about the interviews - it will really depend on the specific job. I did NLP for fraud investigation for almost a decade and now work in big tech on a non-NLP related project. It's definitely not too late to switch careers like this, and doing so might give you many opportunities. If you love what you do, you can move very quickly in the tech industry, ESPECIALLY in the space of computational linguistics. I suppose.Īnd you're never too late to make a change in your career. Soon they will leave us in the dust probably. We're at an interesting point right now because computers have recently caught up to humans in many of these spaces. (For example, things like sentiment analysis). I would also try to familiarize yourself with some of the major problems in industry that are categorized as linguistic problems, and some of the high level on what the state of the art is in these fields. When I got into this space at first, I watched it forever it seemed like. There are countless hours of introductory material on this stuff.
Linguist careers how to#
However, some familiarization with the scientific process, very basic statistics, and understanding how to setup/replicate experiments is important. I'm not sure how far you want to go down the rabbit hole for computer science and that formal training, but I would recommend at least starting with some of it.ĭefinitely learn python so you can read and understand detailed results. The fancy machine learning methodologies have replaced a lot of the formal linguistic domain knowledge in the industry but not all of it :) Started in linguistics, and now I do almost exclusively computational linguistics. Thank you so much for for your advice, it means a lot to me!
that I am fluent in English and a native Arabic speaker.ĭo I need to take courses or internships to imorove my chances to get these jobs? What sort of courses? Provided by which platforms? Any advice on writing cv and preparing for interviews?Īnd is it late too late make such a change in my mid career with no experience in tech industry? I think these positions are in high demand, where I can be paid well, and work in something I enjoy! Esp. So I noticed jobs posted as data linguist, QA linguist, linguist engineer and linguist posted in tech companies such as Apple and Amazon, where some of Arabic language major firends I know landed similar jobs. Unfortunately, my math skills suck and programming is not my thing. TBH, I am astonished at how IT and tech industry is defining the future with tech careers growing steadily, as other careers are dying. Even though I worked with big comlanies, I feel I need to improve my career and focus on a specific path, after I recently decided to not pursue PHD and academa. Since I finished BA in 2008, I worked in translation, interpreting, NGOs and Arabic language lecturing. I hold a BA and an MA in English language and literature.