Data Scientist

Data Scientist

The sexiest job of the century?

The field of data science is a product of other sciences, in particular Statistics and Data Mining, and it’s a relatively young sector where the name data scientist made its first appearance in 2008.

As a data scientist you are specialized in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of large amounts of data to elaborate businesses strategies of success. You are responsible for creating data models by using programming languages such as Python and R.

Given the complexity of the role, you work along with other professionals in the team such as business analysts, software engineers, IT architects, and IT developers.

As a data scientist your responsibilities can include:

• Collecting structured and unstructured data;
• Cleaning and preparing data;
• Executing data analysis to spot trend and/or patterns;
• Coding new algorithms for the collection and processing of data set;
• Visualize data and elaborate reports to communicate the results and/or forecast to stakeholders.

Competences

A data scientist is required to be familiar with different disciplines: Informatics, Statistics, understanding of the market, and of the business logic. Moreover, given the continuous advances in technology, it is important to be able to understand and make use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

As a data scientist you know:

• Business Intelligence (BI) and data warehouse (DW);
• Programming languages (Python,R, Matlab, SQL);
• Big Data platforms (MongoDB, Oracle, Cloudera);
• Machine Learning techniques (Natural Language Processing, Classification, Clustering, Ensemble Methods, Deep Learning);
• Data Mining, Data cleaning, and Data wrangling;
• Cloud Computing;
• Data visualization ( Java, R, Phyton, SAS, D3.js).

Conclusions: still the sexiest job?

The role of data scientist has gained a lot of popularity in the past years, so much so that Harvard Business School (published in 2012) defined it as the sexiest job of the 21st century. As a result, universities have introduced degree programmes in Data Science, which requires knowledge in several disciplines such as Statistics, business, and programming. In any event, many professionals today come from diverse educational backgrounds, mainly being from computational and data.

“What data scientists do is make discoveries while swimming in data. […] In a competitive landscape where challenges keep changing and data never stops flowing, data scientists help decision-makers shift from ad hoc analysis to an ongoing conversation with data.” 3.

“By 2019, postings for data scientists on Indeed had risen by 256%, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, predicts data science will see more growth than almost any other field between now and 2029.” 4.

Yet, it remains a profession that leaves many questions open: does the employees feel their work is valued? Do the companies care about their well-being? Are the companies effectively adopting data-driven solutions?

At the same time, other aspects have taken a positive turn. Compared to 2012, Data Science has institutionalized itself, with all the big firms and government agencies having implemented Data Science departments. Moreover, Data Science has had a major role in tackling the Covid-19 pandemic as well as other societal crises. Besides, other professional roles have been rising to support data scientist’s work, such as Machine Learning Engineer or Data Engineer.

3. “Data Scientist: the sexiest job of the 21st century.” Harvard Business School, 2012, https://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century.

   Accessed 14 September 2023.

4. https://hbr.org/2022/07/is-data-scientist-still-the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century

Other sources:

https://www.geekandjob.com/carriera/data-scientist