Are you thinking of starting a career in data science?
The very thought can leave you dazed and confused, especially if you lack previous experience in the field. With so many different data science careers to explore, you might find yourself w onder ing which is the right one for you and if you’ve got what it takes to fit the profile.
Under the Data Science Career, we have the Big Three: Data Analyst, Data Scientist, and Data Engineer. But today our focus career to explore is DATA SCIENTIST.
What does a Data Scientist do?
Data scientists do many of the same things as data analysts, but they also typically build machine learning models to make accurate predictions about the future based on past data. A data scientist often has more freedom to pursue their own ideas and experiment to find interesting patterns and trends in the data that management may not have thought about.
As a data scientist, you might be asked to assess how a change in marketing strategy could affect your company’s bottom line. This would entail a lot of data analysis work (acquiring, cleaning, and visualizing data), but it would also probably require building and training a machine learning model that can make reliable future predictions based on past data.
Skills required: All the skills required of a data analyst, plus:
- A solid understanding of both supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods
- A strong understanding of statistics and the ability to evaluate statistical models
- More advanced data-science-related programming skills in Python or R, and potentially familiarity with other tools like Apache Spark
Career prospects: If you’re working as a data scientist, your next job title may well be senior data scientist. If you want to maximize earnings, your goal might be a C-suite role in data — such as chief data officer — although these roles require management skills and may not involve a lot of actual day-to-day work with data.
Manu Anand
Director Alpha Mindz, Goa
