Tractor Supply, the No. 1 large company in this year's Best Places to Work in IT rankings, cultivates and reinforces its innovation culture through company-wide events as well as a broad spectrum of training and education programs. Tractor Supply IT employees are encouraged to spend time in-store to get first-hand experience in what frontline team members accomplish on a daily basis. Job shadowing lets IT staffers to explore new roles they may be interested in.
If you want to work in AI, you need to show that you can actually do the work. Launch real projects using public datasets, deploy a demo, post your work on GitHub, or write about it on a blog. Participate in hackathons - they're a fantastic way to demonstrate initiative and teamwork in a short time. We organize hackathons ourselves and are often impressed by what participants produce. It's concrete proof of what you can do.
I got my Master's in Computer Science in 2011, and like others, I got tracked into coding as a software engineer. I started my career as a Java engineer developing software applications. Six or seven years later, I came across the profile of machine learning. Machine learning was not in a boom at that moment. The projects we got were almost always software engineering; machine learning projects were really, really hard to get.