What New Data Scientists Need to Know for Their First Job

There are certain things or quality traits that separate great data scientists from the good data scientists. If you have just completed your data science course and in the process of applying for your first job, you need to pay attention to the following:

Customer Thinking

This is one of the most important factors that distinguishes you from the mediocre. Data science is a highly complex field. Moreover, it is a dynamic and evolving field which requires a deep understanding of many subjects ranging from coding to mathematics.  Customers as such know what they want but cannot put a finger to it. They have the data and to an extent some knowledge of the problem but they want the professional to extract meaningful information from it.

A top of the line data scientist will keep looking at innovative ways to solve customers’ problems in the most impactful way.  They approach the problem from a variety of angles and keeping questions such as Does the customer need better accuracy? Better recall? Do they need faster runtime? Always at the back of their mind. This allows them to put their customers at the centre of their work which greatly endears them to their customers.

Data Munging

Data Science Master’s program

Another important aspect that separates an exceptional data scientist from an average one is the ability to work with different with a wide variety of data formats and types.  Please remember that being a data scientist you cannot afford to be complacent or lazy. The number of projects coming your way with well-formatted data are going to be few and at infrequent intervals.

More often than not you will be asked to handle clients with garbled data placed at different locations and an outdated software to work on that data.  To achieve your purpose and derive meaningful insights from such jumbled data, it is imperative that the data scientist possess the ability to bring together data from a variety of formats such as PDFs, XML, unpack deeply-nested JSON from a vague API and rip data from different webpages to obtain relevant information.

DevOps

The last but certainly not the least skill that separates great data scientists is an awareness of DevOps. Data scientists need not be top DevOps experts but nevertheless they are required to deploy analytics and DevOps is the vehicle they need to ride on to achieve that purpose.

Data Science Master’s program from a reputable online institute equips with all the relevant knowledge and information that Data science interviewers look for in their candidates. This significantly enhances your chances of bagging your dream job and turn into a great data scientist. 

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