Dear Readers,
Tongston is a multi-award-winning group focused on entrepreneurial education, enterprise, finance and media leveraging technology to turn people, governments and institutions into valuable, influential and profitable entities.
Check out our latest entry in our Entrepreneurial Blog sharing with you amazing insights on enterprise, education, media and finance globally, premised on entrepreneurial thinking.
Introduction

The objective of this article is to provide a guide for you on the skills needed for a successful career path as a data scientist, questions like How can I break into this career? How do I get started? How relevant are these skills? What are their importance? and Must all be attained before I can become a certified data scientist? Will be answered in this article. Do have a good read!

Table Of Contents

● Who is a data scientist?
● Career opportunities in data science
● Top skills to break into a career in data science
● How to get started
● Conclusion

Who is a data scientist?

This is the big question every data science enthusiast wants to know. Knowing what a career path entails before trending helps to sharpen the bit-by-bit step to achieving a goal. It isn’t ideal if till today one still mistakes a data analyst for a data scientist, well after the introduction, I am such a person who will have more understanding of
who a data scientist is. A data scientist is an analytics professional responsible for collecting, analysing, and interpreting data to help drive decision-making in an organisation. This is the technical meaning of data science, it isn’t limited to analyzing alone, making sense of structured, and unstructured data, building models, training models, testing models, and making meaningful and insightful decisions are all encompassed in data science.
The data scientist’s role combines elements of technical professions, including mathematician, scientist, statistician, and computer programmer. It involves using advanced analytics techniques, such as machine learning and reductive models, along with applying scientific principles; these areas will be discussed later in this article.

Career opportunities in data science

The saying “ I am a Data scientist” is for the generality of the profession as there are different areas of focus data science is embedded with, and an individual needs to focus on at least one of them, below is a list of some of these careers.
● Data Engineer click Here for further reading
● Business Intelligence (BI) Developer click Here for further reading
● Machine Learning Scientist click Here for further reading
● Data Scientist click Here for further reading
● Machine Learning Engineer click Here for further reading
● Applications Architect Click Here for further reading
● Data Analyst Click Here for further reading

Top skills to break into a career in data science

The skills needed to break into a career in data science or thrive in the data science career path are grouped into two basically:

Technical Skills: These are the needed skills for carrying out the core task of a data scientist, technical skills in a nutshell are the programming skills. This is also segmented as different software has different purposes, below is its segment:

● Analytics Programming Skill: Python, R, C, C++, Java, and SQL
● Analytics Software Skill: Excel, SAS, and SPSS
● Data Visualization: Tableau, and PowerBi
● Artificial Intelligent (AI): Neural networks, Natural language processing (NLP), Reinforcement learning, and Computer vision.
Non-Technical Skills: These skills complement the non-technical skills, they are very important and if found wanting in a data scientist, such a data scientist is a half-baked one. These skills help us understand your thesis better, it grooms the analytical skills and helps in reporting. Below are the non-technical skills:
● Communication Skill: Writing, speaking, reading, and Listening.
● Presentation Skill
● Project Collaboration
● Teamwork
● Work ethics

How to get started

You can start your data science journey with Tongston’s Introduction to data science product, the course has all it takes to get you started, for enquiry check out our website www.tongston.com and subscribe to our newsletter.

Conclusion

I hope you had a good read. The article has been able to enlighten the reader on what data science is, the career opportunities in data science, the top skills needed, and how to get started.

Watch out for our next Data science Insight only on Tongston Entrepreneurial Blog every Thursday!