[akg_67]

What type of consulting do you do? Are you familiar with any specific industry vertical? How do you get clients for your consulting business? Acquiring contract work in data science is no different that selling in your business. It is same as selling any other consulting services.

In my experience, it is very difficult to get data science and analysis work (except in tech/web analytics) unless you understand a specific industry segment. I have been able to get data analysis contract work by focusing on a specific industry niche.

Identify a niche, do data analysis in that niche on your own, share your findings with the people working in your niche, participate on forums in your niche. Stay patient, keep diving in data analysis for your niche, and leads will come to you. Clients need to know you exist, you know their business, and you have unique/interesting insights that can help them in their business.

Become a data-backed industry specialist instead of just a generic data scientist/analyst. Kaggle, Elance and oDesk are not worth spending time on for data analysis work unless you see a project in your targeted niche.

[TBDMark]

I'm currently in a niche vertical and am one of a small group of firms who service the industry. My goal is to move beyond this sector into others, to broaden my client base. Most of my clients do come from personal/word of mouth networking.

Good advice on doing some independent work in the niche I'm interested in. I'll look further into that. Thank you!