Data science paves an enticing career path for students and existing professionals. Be it product development, improving customer retention, or mining through data to find new business opportunities, organizations are extensively relying on data scientists to sustain, grow, and stay one step ahead of the competition. This throws light on the growing demand for data scientists. If you, too, are aspiring to become a successful data scientist, you have landed at the right place for we will talk about the top 10 data science prerequisites you should know in 2023. Have a look!
Statistics
As a matter of fact, data science has a lot to do with data. In such a case, statistics turn out to be a blessing. This is for the sole reason that statistics help to dig deeper into data and gain valuable insights from them. The reality is – the more statistics you know, the more you will be able to analyze and quantify the uncertainty in a dataset.
Understanding analytical tools
Yet another important prerequisite for data science is to have a fair understanding of analytical tools. This is because a data scientist can extract valuable information from an organized data set via analytical tools. Some popular data analytical tools that you can get your hands on are – SAS, Hadoop, Spark, Hive, Pig, and R.
Programming
Data scientists are involved in procuring, cleaning, munging, and organizing data. For all of these tasks, programming comes in handy. Statistical programming languages such as R and Python serve the purpose here. If you want to excel as a data scientist, make sure that you are well-versed in Python and R.
Machine learning (ML)
Data scientists are entrusted with yet another important business task – identifying business problems and turning them into Machine Learning tasks. When you receive datasets, you are required to use your Machine Learning skills to feed the algorithms with data. ML will process these data in real time via data-driven models and efficient algorithms.
Apache Spark
Apache Spark is just the right computation framework you need when it comes to running complicated algorithms faster. With this framework, you can save time a lot of time while processing a big sea of data. In addition to that, it also helps Data Scientists handle large, unstructured, and complex data sets in the best possible manner.
Data Visualization
Yet another important prerequisite for data science that cannot go unnoticed is data visualization, a representation of data visually, through graphs and charts. As a data scientist, you should be able to represent data graphically, using charts, graphs, maps, etc. The extensive amount of data generated each day is the very reason why we require data visualization.
Communication skills
The fact that communication skill is one of the most important non-technical skill that one should possess, no matter what the job role is, goes without saying. Even in the case of data science, communication turns out to be an important prerequisite. This is because data scientists are required to clearly translate technical findings to the other non-technical teams like Sales, Operations or Marketing Departments. They should also be able to provide meaningful insights, hence enabling the business to make wiser decisions.
Excel
Excel is one tool that is extremely important to understand, manipulate, analyze and visualize data, hence a prerequisite for data science. With Excel, it is quite easy to proceed with manipulations and computations that have to be done on the data. Having sound Excel knowledge will definitely help you become a successful data scientist.
Teamwork
No matter how critical or simple the task is, one should always be good at teamwork. In the case of data science too, teamwork would take you to heights.
