Data Scientist

What is a Data Scientist?

Data Science is an interdisciplinary role working at the intersections of data analysis and statistics, data visualisation, business intelligence, and even machine learning and artificial intelligence.

It is the role of the Data Scientist to extract insights from, and spot trends in, data sets, both traditional and Big Data, and apply them to real world problems, usually within a business context.

Data Scientist job description

Data Scientists have a broad range of responsibilities. In general, their roles can be understood in a series of steps:

Gathering a good set of data f or analysis

Creating reports and data visualisations

Communicating their results and recommendations to the relevant stakeholders and business units

As such, a Data Scientist job description needs to include:

Identify opportunities to leverage data insights and drive business solutions

Optimise the data collection process

Clean, mine, and analyse data

Develop models and algorithms

Develop and maintain database(s)

Create visualisations of data

Communicate findings to relevant stakeholders

Typically, Data Scientist roles are split into Types A and B: Type A analyses the data, and B builds models of the data.

What skills and qualifications should a Data Scientist have?

As a highly technical and analytical role, Data Scientists need to have strong numeracy skills, particularly in statistics and data science. And though a tertiary education is not essential, most have qualifications in data science, mathematics/statistics, or computer science.

Working with databases, including a good knowledge SQL

Working knowledge of relevant programming languages, including Python, R, Java, Javascript, C/C++, MATLAB, Scala, Julia, and SAS

Understanding and application of machine learning techniques

Advanced statistical knowledge

Soft skills should include:

Communication

Collaboration

Problem solving

Critical thinking

Creativity

Presentation skills

Business acumen

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