Data Scientist Profile In 2019 Education And Skills Set
A data science career is one of the most sought after in modern times. The harnessing of data has been made possible by advancements in AI, ML, Deep Learning and Neural Networks over the past three decades. And, the very volume of data being generated is so humungous that the term big has become Peta volumes of data and Peta times as big.
The job is not only highly paid, in high demand, but is also very satisfying. Let us then take a look at the education, skills, and attributes required to make a data science career.
The successful data scientists of 2019 look a little like this to those aspiring to be one. According to bigdata-madesimple.com, the typical data scientist is 69% a bilingual male, has about 8 years of work experience of which 2.3 years are as a data scientist. 74% of them have a Masters or doctoral degree and 73% of them are fluent in Python or R. But that is not the whole truth. What if you are fluent in Java and are a female?
There are almost as many PhDs-28 percents to be exact, as there are graduates and lower aspirants who are almost 24.2 percent of the aspirants. This would lead one to infer that a Ph.D. is not essential and it is the skill and abilities that count for more than just the degrees. You could land a job with an IT background if you are in that 9 percent of the cases or land an internship in 8 percent of the cases too.
The main contributors serving as the magic doorways were experienced in the field of consultancy services in 6 percent of the cases, from the field of data analysis in 13 percent cases, or from the IT field in 9 percent of the cases. A sizeable 50 per cent also came in with experience as data scientists meaning the offers were more than acceptable in monetary terms to shift jobs. 15 percent formed the other category in terms of their fields of specialization.
The popular educational background subjects were 22 percent from Computer Science, 21 percent from Economics and a mere 12 percent from data sciences. This is probably due to lack of data science degrees or that there is ample scope for academic circles to include this as a subject at the college levels.
Which university you study in may not improve your employability as a data scientist. While 31 percent had studied at the top 50 as per the 2019 Times Higher Education Ranking, 24 percent came from universities ranked at 1001 and more. More than half of the participants had taken online courses with 43 percent having completed at least 1 such course of an average of 3 courses. The popularity of these courses would indicate that aspirants took courses to increase their skills and competitive edge in the job market. Fortunately, the university ranking does not appear to matter when being employed as a data scientist.
Python is the leading preferred data science course among the programming skills globally which is closely followed by R. In India and the USA the skills in R and Python are both valuable unlike in the UK and other areas where Python led the charts. About 70 percent of the data scientists in 2018 had previously worked in the tech industry. In 2019 just 43 percent were from the tech industries and 57 percent from other industries and the financial sector.
Country-wise statistics show that the industrial sector in the UK recruited more data scientists than the tech segment which is not the trend in other areas. The normal pattern is broken by India in terms of it having fewer PhDs and larger numbers of graduate data scientists. The USA has the least number of new hires in the data scientist role compared to other countries and the preference for Python as the choice of a programming language is slightly higher in the non-Fortune 500-list of firms.
Conclusions:
The survey of the data definitely indicates that the data science career is one of the best for career aspirants. It also indicates that your interest in acquiring the skills is very crucial to your achieving the task. Training institutes like Imarticus Learning are at the forefront in turning out wholesome data scientists with the skills to fit any employer’s bill of employability. The icing on the cake is that this data-based career is for all aspirants immaterial of educational background, degrees, sex or location. Reach out to Imarticus today. Hurry!
