Chris Shupe, a 33-year-old data analyst, YouTuber, and career coach from Tampa, Florida, landed a $70,000 data analyst role using self-taught skills. Since then, he’s expanded his career, worked fully remote, and traveled the world while working from his laptop. It might sound like a dream, but for Chris and many others aware of the modern employment landscape, it’s very much a reality. And Chris is helping others in his former situation to pick up the skills and land a job in data analysis. Shupe came from traditional middle-class American society, whose idea of how to be successful is “go to college, get a good job, and climb the corporate ladder.” But Chris, like many of the millennial generation, found that path to be less realistic than he was led to believe.
Like most “responsible” kids of his generation and social strata, Chris graduated from high school, went to a four year college, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree. However, the expected “good job” never materialized. Chris spent the next 12 months submitting applications to any and every full time office job he could find. Anything that would pay the bills. His efforts were in vain, however, and he had no choice but to keep his part-time college job as a waiter’s assistant.
Working as a waiter’s assistant wasn’t the aim of his degree. Still, people move on, and Chris was motivated to succeed. He kept learning and kept growing, believing that somehow he would learn whatever was necessary to create the life of freedom he desired. After tinkering with various things, Chris eventually discovered that he rather enjoyed working with spreadsheets and databases. Shortly afterward, his post-college path straightened when he landed his first full-time job with the Nielsen Company, a newbie office job earning $38,000 a year. It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than working part time as a waiter’s assistant. The hiring manager liked his data skills and initiative, providing Chris with hope for the future.
Wisely taking advantage of his new position, he continued to develop his skills whilst working at Nielsen. His smarts would pay off 11 months later, when he landed his first job as a data analyst, with a salary of $70,000 per year–nearly double his previous salary. Chris took his self-taught data expertise to multiple companies, and eventually started working fully remote and travelling to and living in various countries, including Colombia, Brazil, Canada, the UK, Spain, Switzerland, and Hungary.
His discovery of data analytics as a career path made a huge difference in his life, providing a generous salary, freedom, and plenty of opportunity for growth and career advancement. After a while, Chris started to notice that there were a lot of people who wanted the lifestyle he had discovered for himself. So he decided to help other people follow the same career path, which eventually culminated in the ‘CareerHacker’ movement.
“CareerHackers don’t have to settle for whatever job happens to fall in their lap. Instead, they define and create the career or business that fulfills them and makes their lifestyle goals a reality.” ~ Chris Shupe
Chris formed the movement to create a thriving community of individuals with the drive to create careers and businesses that would support their dream life. One platform Chris uses to generate interest and use as a hub for the ever-growing community is his Facebook Group, free for anyone to join who’s seeking a career change, looking to land their first job or launch their own business. “Success comes from knowledge. And with the power of the internet, virtually all the knowledge in the world is available at our fingertips. Anything we don’t know, we can figure out. Any skill we don’t have, we can learn.” Chris Shupe says that any support or help we need, we can find someone who can give it, and his community is an area to receive that knowledge and support.
Chris also has a Youtube channel with videos that show his viewers how to get clear on what they want in life, and how to use the resources available to them to make their dreams a reality. Chris’s followers choose not to reinvent the wheel but instead follow and learn from Chris’s path, some specifically and some more broadly, depending on their unique interests and goals. Some decide to become data analysts themselves (this being a job position that almost always has more jobs available than people to fill them), and some go on to join his CareerHacker Data Analyst Mentorship program. Others choose other career paths that are better suited to their interests and abilities. Chris claims that the CareerHacker methodology works for any career or business, and that for every career goal there is a path to success.
Chris says his desire is to help people who are dissatisfied with their career path and know they’re capable of better. Perhaps they feel disappointed at work, they lack fulfillment, they aren’t getting paid as much as they’d like, or they don’t have the lifestyle freedom and flexibility they’d like. But nobody is doomed to an unsatisfying career forever, Chris says. There’s always a better path. As he puts it, “If you have a feeling of dissatisfaction with what you’re doing, that’s your soul telling you you’re doing the wrong thing. The same way you feel pain when your body is being harmed, your spirit feels negative emotion when you’re failing to realize your full potential. It’s a warning, and we should listen to it.”
While Chris is the first to admit that he doesn’t have expertise in every career his followers might desire, he runs a personal mentorship program in the one field he does know very well: data analytics. His program personal mentorship is tailored to get students hired as data analysts as fast as possible. Unlike most other training programs, Chris says the goal of his program is to teach the minimum amount necessary to get a job. After that, he says, “learn as much as you can, and expand your skill set for future promotions and career advancement.” He believes it’s best to learn as much as possible while on the job and getting paid for it. That’s a big part of what it means to be a “CareerHacker”.
Chris claims that even people with no experience can get hired as data analysts. “After all, everyone has to start somewhere. I didn’t have experience when I started either”, says Chris. He claims that because of his experience in the field, he understands what companies are looking for and can get students’ resumes past the human resources office, into the hiring manager’s hands, and into the “call for interview” pile. Chris’s strategies involve some clever tricks for creating experience on the resume, and finding unique ways to prove skills to potential employers.
Once they score the initial interview, Chris teaches his students a novel approach to interviewing which he calls the “consultative interview method”, in which the job seeker positions himself as a consultant whose purpose is to find ways to improve the interviewer’s business. “That’s the whole reason they’re considering hiring you in the first place”, Chris says.
Chris guarantees his mentorship clients that he will continue working with them as long as it takes for them to get hired at no extra charge, which he sees as a more honest guarantee than the “don’t pay unless you get hired” guarantees that many other training programs offer. He says if you look through the fine print on those guarantees, you find that they include so many requirements and qualifications that it’s near impossible for anyone to ever qualify. Chris prefers his approach, because, as he says, “it’s a team effort, and both sides need to do our part and keep going until we cross the finish line.”
If you’d like to learn more about the CareerHacker Data Analyst Mentorship program, you can visit the official website here:
http://www.careerhackerdataanalyst.com