Who is a Data Scientist? Salary, Skills & Career
Data science is the study of extensive volumes of data that employ modern tools and techniques like machine learning, AI, and big data to discover specific patterns from the given data and derive a piece of meaningful information from it. This information is further useful for making various business decisions. The one who performs all these functions and operations is called a data scientist.
In this article, you will learn who a data scientist is and how to become a data scientist in India followed by the mandated skills, available career options and data overview.
Who is a Data Scientist?
A data scientist applies data to understand and illustrate the situation and to assist an organization in making better decisions. These are a mix of computer scientists, mathematicians, and trend predictors and thus are in high demand in business as well as in IT sectors.
What Does a Data Scientist Do?
A data scientist’s primary responsibility is to understand how to extract meaningful information from the data and analyse it.
The typical job duties and responsibilities of a data scientist include;
- Designing data, modelling strategies, and suggesting economic modifications to the existing methods and strategies.
- Building typical machine learning algorithms and data to model and forecast the outcomes.
- Continuously extracting massive volumes of structured data (using programming languages like SQL) as well as unstructured data (via APIs, web scraping, and surveys). Further, collaborate with various departments to obtain a solution to business concerns via scientific tools.
- Cleaning of data to scrap irrelevant information and conducting an exploratory data study to decide how to address missing data.
Skills Required to Become a Data Scientist
As we read under the previous header, a data scientist is one who handles a large amount of data and is responsible for organizing, analysing and decoding them at various levels. There are various professional and statistical skills a data scientist holds. Some of the principal ones are:
- Good command of programming languages like Python, SQL, Hadoop, and SAS.
- Expertise in machine learning techniques.
- Ability to analyse risk and visualize data for reporting and identifying patterns and trends.
- Effective verbal and written language communication skills for better communication.
- Ability to build algorithms to excavate and store big data.
- Knowledge of different cloud computing tools.
- Expertise in data extracting, cleaning errors and munging them.
- Ability to apply probability, statistics, and mathematical knowledge to build a programme.
- In-depth software and research skills.
However, even if you are a beginner or have minimal expertise you can still pursue a career in the data science domain with the help of different offline as well as online certification courses. Emeritus India offers top-notch data science courses online that can help you get a professional or executive-level certification from reputed institutes like IIT, IIM, XLRI, and SPJIMR. Expert faculty members design diverse and extensive curricula for these courses, helping you acquire in-demand skills and gain an in-depth understanding of the subject.
Salary of a Data Scientist
A data scientist’s salary depends on expertise, data analytics skillset, educational qualification, and even on location. Different fields like healthcare, IT, digital economy, machine translation, big data, manufacturing industry as well as agriculture, medical informatics, speech recognition and even economics and human resources fields require data sciences experts.
There are several data scientists job opportunities in India. Whether you are a software developer, data analyst, business analyst, system or database administrator, if the study of data, its processing, and application is your area of interest, then data scientist can be your career option.
In India, a data scientist’s salary starts somewhere from ₹ 4 to ₹ 4. 5 Lakhs [Source] and goes up to ₹ 24.0 to ₹ 25.0 Lakhs as per their expertise and experience. If we look at the average annual salary of a data scientist, it is around ₹ 10.5 Lakhs per annum [Source].
Data Scientist Career Scope
We live in an era ruled by digital platforms, and data here plays an essential role. With every passing minute, the bulk of data is generated, analysed, and processed, which will increase in the coming days. Thus, there is a huge requirement for a data scientist in every industry.
Moreover, companies like Accenture, Tata Consultancy Services Limited, HCL Technologies Ltd, IBM India Private Limited, and Amazon are the top recruiters of Data scientists in India.
Data science has further contributed to creating tailored products for the most significant customer experiences. Be it the OTT platforms or self-driven cars. Data science has redefined the traditional norm of creating products for consumers.
Thus if you are an aspiring data scientist and have this constant pursuit of learning about data and how it works, then brace yourself with the required skills and certification and step ahead to explore the data from the data scientist’s viewpoint.
