I’m not a data scientist by trade, but ended up spending a lot of time with data to help drive decision to move the ball forward in the areas I felt needed to move forward.

But of course, any sufficiently large company is going to have some level of bureaucracy that slows things down. It’s the nature of the beast.

I found side projects helped for this. I’ve had one long-running side project at work for over 10 years now. Whenever things are moving slow and I’m waiting, or I just need to tinker and learn something new, that’s where I go. It’s useful for the company, it has a few hundred internal users, most probably don’t even know who I am, but it mostly exists as a place for me to tinker.

In my experience the people who keep learning and progressing professionally when their day job isn't pushing them are intrinsically motivated and simply do this on their own. They find things to learn and they find ways to progress professionally. They identify skills they lack and get them. They have ideas and follow them through.

I think you have to figure out whether you are one of those people right now or not. It's fine to not be (you can always change in the future) but at least you can stop worrying about it.

But, when I had, on a very slow moving company called XI, I just focused on side projects.