The Data Scientist Career Path

You’re incredible at number-crunching and love using technical software to make sense of enormous amounts of data. At the core of it, data scientists analyze unstructured and structured data to meet the company’s business needs.

The role of a data scientist is part statistics, part computer science, and part marketing. The first two are obvious. But, why marketing? The complex algorithms are eventually needed by other stakeholders to increase the use of the product.

The Data Scientist Role

The primary focus of a data scientist is to apply data mining techniques, conduct statistical analysis, and build predictive models to improve the usage of the company’s products.

The types of data that you might handle includes structured and unstructured data. Structured data are categories that is easy for a computer to sort and organise automatically, such as, website traffic data, sales data and so on. On the other hand, unstructured data, comes from human input, such as customer reviews, social media engagement, and customer emails. This type of data is harder to sort through, but businesses can gain information from them if they are able to make sense of these data.

How to become a data scientist

A strong educational background is required to qualify as a data scientist. More than 50% of data scientists have a Master’s degree in a relevant field of Statistics, Computer Science or Engineering.

On top of these, you would need to have experience in R and Python programming languages. You should also understand applied machine learning algorithms to train your machine learning model and be knowledgeable in data visualisation to extract useful information out of the models.
As always, we recommend getting an internship or work experience to showcase your expertise in data science.

Gatot Wijanarko