A Guide on How To Land Your First Job in Data Science

The world where data is constantly proliferating, taking care of this zillion byte of data is much of a heroic task as a data professional. The career that barely existed a decade ago has become one of the most sought-after professions. According to Harvard Business Review, the role of data professional is being referred as the sexiest career of the 21st century. This data scientist career can provide you an attractive salary along with a great work-life balance.

Career Opportunities

It should be no surprise that data science professional are the most coveted professionals in the field of Big Data Analytics. The sky is the only limit! The demand of a skilled data professional is increasing day by day in Start-ups as well as in other big companies. With no signs of slowing down, there’s a competition amongst all the well-established global companies to hire the best data scientists.

Different Job Roles in Data Science

There are a lot of roles in data science because a data science team generally replies on different team members for different skill set which is needed.

Data Scientists- A data scientist is someone who fine-tunes the mathematical & statistical models which are then applied to that data including the application of theoretical knowledge of statistics & algorithms. This helps in finding the best way to solve any data problem. The data scientist act as a bridge between programming & algorithm thinking.

Data Analysts- Data analyst filters through data & provides report & visualizations to describe what the data can give. They help people across the company to understand specific queries with charts.

Data Engineers- Data engineers are software geeks who manage enormous amounts of data & lay the groundwork for data scientists to do their jobs properly. They manage database systems, scale the data architecture to multiple servers & write complex queries to filter through the data. A data engineer is responsible for cleaning up data sets, implement complex requests from data scientists as well. The skills needed for this role is having knowledge in Hadoop-based technologies & other important programming languages such as Ruby, Python.

Salary Ranges

Data scientists are known to have the highest compensation with an average salary $1, 16,000 USD or above than that. The average salary for data analysts is around $66,000 because the roles are taken up by entry-level graduates with limited work experience.

Data Science Skills

• Data science involves a lot of problem-solving. You need to have an analytical mind & have to be adept at approaching problems analytically & methodically.
• You must know the basics of mathematics, from calculus to linear algebra. In data science, mathematics has greater emphasis always, so the more you know, the better.
• Make sure you have a deep knowledge of statistics. Because you need to know it to play with data. This helps you to extract the insights from data that you need to make conclusions.
• Algorithms are super important for doing any heavy lifting in data science. You need to have a solid understanding of the theory behind algorithm optimization & selection.
• Without business knowledge data is little! The ideal data scientist must have the general business knowledge which will allow them to ask the right questions & come up with meaningful solutions for business.

Termed as the sexiest job of the 21st century, data science is ideal for people who are thinking of a long-term career in big data. This new exciting field requires such individuals who are interested in solving cutting-edge problems.