Data Scientist, the career of the future?
One of the buzz words of the IT world in recent years has been “Data Scientist”. This begs the question of exactly what a data scientist does and why this career has grown so steadily in recent years.
Pablo González, Data Scientist of GMV Secure e-Solutions, contributed to the document EMPLEO IT 2017, which runs through upcoming careers and the skills that will be needed from future professionals. It focuses on the job of Data Scientist, where Pablo stressed the current boom in sectors that used to view such a job as largely unnecessary. As he points out in his interview, “many firms are now realizing how much value might be gleaned from the data they are handling”.
The ongoing growth of major corporations and the digital transformation we are currently living through spawned the need of analyzing all information generated by companies. This situation led to the coining of the term “Data Scientist”, a career that involves drawing valuable responses and insights from the huge volumes of available information, known as Big Data and gleaned from all types of mass information sources. As an example Pablo González mentioned a project that GMV is currently working on together with an industrial company to carry out predictive maintenance, developing techniques that enable us to head off any imminent failure or aberrant behavior by a member of staff.
Is it hard to become a Data Scientist? You certainly need a good mathematical background and mastery of statistical software, programming and mass data analysis systems like machine learning. GMV’s expert also underlined the importance of an intuitional sense of which model is most likely to clear up the problem.
Although the analysis of business data has been underway for many years in many companies (Data Mining, Business Intelligence, etc) it has only come into its own relatively recently. And the trend is increasingly upwards. A widely cited McKinsey white paper forecasts that “by 2018 there will be a shortage of 1.5 million managers and analysts with analytics skills, as well as a shortage of 190 thousand employees with deep analytical skills.” This shows that we are dealing here with a career of the future.