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Choosing a data profession

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17 views

Choosing a data profession

Uploaded by

thisispavithrabalaji
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Choosing a data profession

What are my options?


Now that you've written down There is no shortage of position names when it comes
your ideal case, let's take a to a career in data. You have data analyst, product
look at several data career analyst, marketing analyst, business analyst, machine
options. Compare the learning engineer, data warehouse expert, data
explanations of the positions engineer and many more.
on this lesson to what you've
jotted down in the last exercise I'm sure you've seen most if not all of them when
and see which one sounds looking for jobs online. Some of these terms are used
closer to your ideal scenario. interchangeably in the business world but we can
group them in 3 major roles: data analyst, data
scientist, data engineer.

On the next page there is an example case where I explain what each
data role would be responsible for in a given project.
This document
has 2 sections:
In the pages after, there are a more in-depth explanation of each role's
responsibilities.

Copyright © Mısra Turp


Let's say we have a start-up and we sell dog toys online. We collect data from every user who visits
our website and store this data on the cloud. If we want to improve sales by using our data.

The data engineer will set up a system for data analysts and data scientists to be able to reach
and use this data.

The data analyst would show us important insights that we should take into consideration for our
next marketing campaign, for example, the age group of our audience and which social media
channels they hang out in.

The data scientist would create a predictive system that takes as input a client's behaviour and
outputs the probability of them buying a product in a given session. You can read this article, if
you want to learn about a data scientist's daily tasks in more detail.

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Data Analyst
What do they do? What do they deliver? Where can you go from there?
A data analyst's job is pretty self-explanatory, to analyse data. A data analyst has multiple possible paths in front of them. You
They extract insights from a dataset to support decision can choose to go into data science, though this would require
processes of businesses by providing decision-makers with you to get new skills while on the job. You can also work on your
actionable information. The work includes creating reports, programming skills to switch to a career in data engineering or
visualisations and presentations, directly aimed at the business more general development.
side of a company. Data analysts are the first step to helping a
business take advantage of their data. You can continue in the role of data analyst and become a
senior data analyst. This would mean that you work more
Similar positions are also called: Product analyst, business closely with the business stakeholders and you probably are the
analyst, marketing analyst and such. For clarification, a product key contact person between the data analysis team and your
analyst, for example, focuses on a specific product and data business. This would make it easier for you to switch to
produced about that product. (S)he creates insights to improve a managerial roles in the future.
product or support the decision of making a new feature. A
marketing analyst looks at marketing data and focuses on
improving marketing performance using insights gained from
data.

People in data analyst and similar roles tend to use


programming to analyse the data. Python is used as well as SQL
or other querying languages as part of their job. This is the data
career that uses querying languages the most in comparison.
The reason is that data analyst tends to already do their analysis
while querying a dataset. So that there is less of a need for
programming in Python. This depends on personal choice and
also a company's tech set-up.

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Data Scientist
What do they do? What do they deliver?
A data scientist is a person who is capable of using the latest They have a solid understanding of their domain and interview
advancements in the machine learning area. They know how to domain experts when necessary. Data scientists present their
implement the technology -many times in the form of machine findings and results in the way that business stakeholders will
learning algorithms, know how to tune these algorithms to understand.
achieve better accuracy and have the knowledge to prepare the
data for better performance. As part of their job, data scientists Programming is the main tool of a data scientist. The most
need to stay on top of the latest advancements and study the common languages are Python and R. Querying languages like
ones that are relevant to their line of work. SQL, though useful, are not used frequently.

Even though less talked-about, one of the most important skill Data scientists' deliverables vary a lot from company to
of data scientists is data manipulation. They know how to alter company and even project to project. The most typical
and augment the data to achieve the desired outcome. They deliverable is an API developed with the help of a software
know how to deal with problematic data and use statistics for engineer that serves predictions or classifications for an
their purposes. application.

Data scientists are data experts in the company. It is their A similar role to data science is machine learning engineer.
responsibility to decide on the approach to be taken to solve a Depending on the company, an ML engineer might do the same
problem or address an issue in the most effective way possible. job as a data scientist, might focus primarily on optimising ML
The approach could be as simple as a graph or as complex as a models or deal with deployment of machine learning solutions.
multi-year project.

As part of their job, data scientists are good communicators.


They are part of the decision-making process and help the
business decide on an approach to a certain problem by
consulting them on the capabilities and limitations of data
science. They know how to translate the business requirements
into technical requirements for themselves.
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Where can you go from there? (Data science contd.)
After you start working as a data scientist the natural next step would be the title of "senior data scientist". The difference is that when
you're a senior data scientist you get more responsibility and become the lead in projects.

After the senior level, you can choose to go into management. A management position would give you a chance to manage many
projects and data scientists but would be less hands-on. You would be responsible for financial parts of a project too. Alternatively,
you can choose to become a technical lead in a company such as a distinguished engineer. This way you probably still be doing hands-
on work on projects but have less of a say when it comes to financial matters.

Data Engineer
What do they do? What do they deliver? Where can you go from there?
A data engineer is someone who focuses on the engineering Specialised data engineers are currently in demand. So by
of a data pipeline. A data pipeline is a process of creating specialising in a certain technology, you can advance in your
and/or collecting data, accessing it, analysing it and creating career. You can also choose to switch to development roles
results from it and putting those results in use. Data engineers using your knowledge in this area.
focus on parts of the pipeline other than the analysis.
Another natural path is to grow into architectural or
Their responsibilities are setting up a reliable data management roles. This is because data engineering issues are
infrastructure and maintaining the infrastructure so that important to big companies and they want people with solid
whoever needs data can reach it quickly and effectively. knowledge on dealing with data on decision making levels of the
Depending on the company the challenges might also include company.
storing unstructured data, moving big amounts of data and
making it accessible for analysis, setting up systems for
undisturbed flow of data, making sure clean and usable data
is collected from sources, merging external data sources into
the company's data infrastructure.

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