Monday, May 8, 2017

Needed skills to be a successful data scientist and analyst.


We are in the digital world, with thousands of digital devices. Data we generate using our computers or smartphones will never be overlooked. Here is where data scientists’ jobs start. Data scientists take this huge messy data and use their mathematical, statistical, and programming skills to clean and organize the data. After that, they leave the rest of the job to data analysts who use their analytic powers to analyze and understand these data to uncover hidden solutions to business challenges.

Nowadays, marketers are no longer predict or assume marketing decisions. In the marketing field, whether it is digital or traditional, we have seen a great improvement of using and analyzing data in order to make smart and precise business decisions. I believe that working with big data to infer solutions capable of making a change in the functionality of any business enterprise needs a highly skilled data scientists and data analysts. You might have asked yourself many times about the skills needed to become a data analyst or data scientist. Whether you are familiar with data analytics tools or not, you first need to understand the basic needed skills to work with analyzing data. These basic skills are called soft skills. Soft skills contain the following:

Curiosity to know more.
In terms of big data and analyzing big data, curiosity will never kill the cat. To be a smart data analyst, you need to be curious. When you are curious, you naturally want to know more and want to know the cause of a particular effect. You will not assume the reasons for why something happens or happened. Instead, you will look for reasonable facts, examine them, correlate them to the effects, and come up with persuasive answers to your questions.

Never overlooked a problem until it is solved.
As a data analyst, your duty is to find solutions to solve a problem. I cannot imagine a data analyst, who is confronting a problem, looking for someone else to help him fix or solve the problem. Data analysts are those who never give up the problems until they think up workable solutions to those problems.

Ask the important questions.
It does not matter how much data you have. In my opinion, the matter is how to find the right data from the right source and at the right time. Before you start collecting data, you need to set up your business goals and ask questions regarding those goals such as what changes do you want this data to do for your business? What are the KPIs that are most related to your business? Questions like these will help you as a data scientist collect only the needed data and will help you to narrow down your attention to the downside of the company for which you are working.

Communication.
As a data analyst, your job is to analyze and organize data, and it is not only analyzing the data, but also delivering your thoughts and analysis to your superiors. If you do not have the ability to communicate with your audience in a business language that they understand, it is going to be a hard time for you to succeed as a data analyst.  

In addition to the soft skills that you should obtain, you also need to be familiar with some technical skills. You need to have a solid understanding of basic statistical programming languages such as SQL, SAS, and Tableau. If you are applying for a data analyst position, you are going to be expected to know at least two of these computer skills which are:


To sum up, data scientists and analysts’ skills are not limited. There are many skills you should try so hard to obtain. Companies are now hiring qualified data analysts and scientists to assist them in using big data to improve their marketing campaigns, consumers’ insights, and better ways and strategies to engage with consumers. Nowadays, Excel is no longer a satisfied skill to work with big data. Indeed, you also need to be knowledgeable about statistical analytics and data visualization to be a successful data analyst.  



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