What are the must-have skills to become a Data Scientist?

Data science professionals play a crucial role within any organization that wants to leverage the power of data in taking their business forward. Now all organizations globally rely on data-driven decisions to ensure the strategies they are making are in the best interest of market trends and customer demand. Data science helps them identify patterns and determine future outlooks. With their data science skills, data science professionals perform all kinds of tasks to extract relevant insights from raw data.

So, what are the skills these professionals possess that have the power to completely transform the position a company holds in the market? What do these data scientists or data analysts do that make such a huge difference and what all tools do they use? In this article, we will have a look at some of the best data science jobs and the skills that one must gain to become an efficient data scientist.

What are the top data science jobs?

Data Science is a vast field that involves several tasks, from gathering and processing data to analyzing and communicating the results. Therefore, it requires a lot of professionals to work on any particular data science project giving them the opportunity to showcase and utilize their skills. Here is a list of some of the best online data science jobs that you can search for and look forward to starting your career with.

1. Data analysts
2. Data Engineer
3. Business analyst
4. Business Intelligence developer
5. Data Architect
6. Data Scientists and many more.

These are some of the most popular data science jobs. In the further section, we will discuss the most in-demand skills of data scientists.

Skills required to become a successful data scientist

Data scientists are expert data science professionals having expertise in mathematics and statistics, computer systems or languages, and business or industry knowledge. They have to use their knowledge of these 3 main areas to develop an efficient model. And therefore, they must be well equipped with the following data scientist skills:

• Programming languages

From data gathering to data analysis, various kinds of data tools are used that require efficiency in programming knowledge like Python, R, C++, etc. So, having hands-on skills on them will ultimately help you to work on the data.

• Mathematical concepts: Statistics and Probability

Data science projects involve linear regression models and machine learning concepts that use statistics. Students and professionals aspiring to get into this field must know about the mean, median, mode, and similar concepts. They must also be aware of probability distribution, sample, population, hypothesis testing, etc.

• Data Visualization

Data visualization is one of the most important parts of the data science project which involves creating interactive and easy-to-understand visuals of the findings. After the analysis, the results have to be communicated to stakeholders so that they can use it in data-driven decision-making. Therefore, the better they understand the insights, the better decision they will make.

Data Visualization tools like MatPlotlib, Tableau, etc. help data science professionals create histograms, charts, Bars, etc., and create great stories out of the data and their insights.

• Machine learning, Deep Learning, and Artificial Intelligence

These skills will help you train and deploy working models, monitor their performance, and improve them over time. ML and AI are not capable of replacing data scientists in their job, but using them can enhance their productivity and speed.

• Business or Industry Knowledge

Data Science projects are made in order to solve major industry problems within the company. The management or business leaders identify the problems and communicate them to the technical team to build an effective model to solve these problems.

Therefore, data scientists need to be well-versed with industry and business knowledge, so that they can understand the problem easily and formulate the right solution for it.

These are some of the technical, mathematical, and domain data scientist skills that are a must to have. Apart from these, they need to have some interpersonal skills as well that will help them perform their job nicely, such as:

• Good communication skills
• Leadership and collaboration skills
• Problem-solving and analytical skills
• Critical thinking, etc.

All these data science skills together help to build a complete data scientist that every organization would love to onboard.

Conclusion

The data science industry is growing at a huge rate. With huge millions of zeta bytes of data generated every day, there is a huge demand for data science professionals who can work out on these massive data sets to help improve business operations. So, if you are aspiring to get into a data science career, then we have already discussed the best data science jobs and what are the top skills you need to gain to prove your mettle. We recommend getting certified, honing your skills, and searching for the best online data science jobs to start with. With continuous efforts, you can surely get to the top.