In a world where 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is being produced every day, a professional who can organize this humongous data and provide business solutions is indeed a hero! Fueled by big data and Artificial Intelligence, the demand for data science skills is exponentially growing, according to various job sites.
What is the role of a data scientist?
Well, the role of a data scientist in a business is similar to that of chilly flakes in a pizza. You might think you don’t need it but once you add it, the pizza just tastes better. A data scientist adds the same spice to your business by bringing in skill sets and knowledge from diverse backgrounds like math, statistics, modeling, analytics, communication, etc. With these skills, they look for insights from a huge amount of data and presents them to the management with solutions to help tackle the challenges and prepare strategies for the business for the future.
Data scientists use analytics tools to analyze the data, uncovers insights and visualize them for interpretation. While other departments work on developing and delivering products and services, a data scientist acts as the bridge that sees if the product that is delivered reaches the customer and if the customers are looking for something else, their behavior, expectations, any challenges or hurdles one can foresee and more.
The demand for Data Scientists
Data-driven decision making is gaining popularity. In the past years, analysts used software like Excel to analyze data, but things are changing now since technology is advanced enough to have tools like –
- Google Analytics for the marketing department.
- Complicated ERPs that breakdown information and create visualizations.
- Tableau, Sisense, Microsoft Power BI for business intelligence department where analysts can visualize the data in unprecedented ways and uncover unexpected insights.
- Outstanding improvements in programming languages such as R and Python, which let you perform complicated analyses with just a couple of lines of code.
Now, if your competitors are relying on data-driven decision making and you aren’t, they will surpass you and steal your market share. Hence, investing in data science is not just beneficial for a business in the long run but also rewarding for immediate results.
This is why Data Scientist is the no. 1 most promising job in America in the year 2019, according to a report from LinkedIn. This comes as no surprise since the Data scientist job profile has topped the Glassdoor’s list of best jobs in America for the past three years, with professionals in the field reporting high demand, high salaries, and high job satisfaction.
Data scientists have a median salary base of $130,000, and they witnessed 56% more job openings this year as compared to the last year. There are now more than 4,000 data science job openings nationwide.
Wrapping Up..
Today, around 6 billion devices are connected globally, generating millions of terabytes of data every day. For a data scientist, this is a treasure chest of insights and vital data that can rewrite the fate of a business they are working for. Our online behavior on social media, e-commerce websites and more are touchpoints of data and these are used by data scientists to provide a better shopping experience and deliver quality service. The fascinating aspect is that the volume of data generated is exactly the reason why data scientists are in huge demand.
So, yes, data science is on the rise, both from the company and the employee’s perspective. This makes data science a great field to get into at the moment.
