As technology continues to advance, the use of “big data” has become increasingly popular. Big data comes from anything – from posts made on social media sites to the number of clicks on a link. With all this big data, the need for data scientists has grown significantly.
A data scientist’s background typically consists of computer science, modeling, math, analytics, and statistics. Currently there are no university programs that offer degrees specifically in data science, which makes it challenging to identify the talent of a data scientist. Skills needed for data scientists include the ability to create structures from large sets of random data into meaningful and actionable information.
Data scientists do not only look at a few sources for clean and well-formatted data, as a traditional data analyst does, but are able to examine and make connections from multiple, sometimes noisy or messy, data sets. They observe data from multiple angles and recommend ways to use and implement the collected data.
What Do Data Scientists Do For Business?
Data scientists can have a variety of different jobs based on required tasks of a company. For example, they can contribute to product online marketing and promotion by analyzing user behavior data. This data includes where users are coming from, what drives them to web pages, what they do once there, their duration on a page, when/where/why they leave the site, any actions taken on the site, and the conversion to customers.
Spotting trends within data can also allow a data scientist to influence R&D decisions. For example, data scientists have been using big data technologies for data processing and analysis of machine data generated from sequencing and genotyping machines.
A data scientist is not restricted to a certain segment of a company because of the vast amount of data that can be analyzed. From technological advances, data that is being collected can influence multiple aspects of a company.
Why Are Data Scientists Important?
What differentiates a data scientist from a typical data analyst role is their ability to distinguish findings for both business and IT leaders. A data scientist’s versatile skill set allows them to contribute findings that can help influence a company’s business strategy. Their biggest advantage is constantly researching and questioning existing assumptions in order to create new recommendations.
A data scientist is a huge asset to any company. Their ability to contribute to multiple aspects of a business and to distinguish valuable data lets data scientists make a significant contribution to the improvement and growth of a company.
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