Data Scientist Job Description: Role, Responsibilities,Salary and Skills Required
In this tutorial, we are going to discuss who are data scientists, how to become a successful data scientist, their job roles, their responsibilities, and the required skills for them. Analysis of data, pre-processing of data, collection of data, and taking useful insights from the raw data all these things are done by a data scientist to improve the business of a particular sector.
Who are data scientists?
Data scientists are the people who practice data science. They will use their skills for analyzing data properly which is collected from the web, smartphones, social media, and so on. Combining statistics, computer science, and mathematics is the main role of a data scientist. They work on both structured and unstructured data, in order to get useful insights needed to improve the overall business of a company.
A data scientist should not only have technical knowledge but also should be able to communicate his ideas with each and everyone right from the customers to the higher authorities. So it is very necessary for a data scientist to become an effective communicator as well as a good leader.
How will data scientists get useful insights from data?
Data exploration
- When a data scientist gets a challenging question or a challenging situation then each and every data scientists act like a detective who will investigate and they will try to understand different patterns as well as different characteristics of the data.
- They utilize the data for the betterment of an organization’s business.
Skills needed for a data scientists
- Deep knowledge in mathematics: to find a solution for a particular problem they have to build many predictive models and these predictive models are based on very hard maths.
- Proper utilization of technology: in order to work with complex algorithms data scientists should analyze the data properly and utilize the technology.
- Be an expert in coding languages: They should be efficient with the coding languages and with some core languages such as SQL, Python, R, and sass.
- Proper understanding of a business: suppose a data set of a particular business is given to a data scientist they should study and analyze it properly to find out where the things are going wrong and to find out a proper solution.
Responsibilities of a data scientist
- Solving business problems: one of the main responsibilities of a data scientist is to identify the business problem faced by a particular sector and take appropriate measures in order to solve and improve the business.
- Discuss the findings and predictions: using effective reports and effective visualizations of data the data scientists should communicate all the findings as well as the predictions to the management and the IT department.
- Gathering useful information: As we all know unimaginable data is generated each and every second from different sources. So data scientists should gather useful insights from different sources and use them for the improvement of the business.
- Avoiding repetitive work: To avoid repetitive work they should always find out new and appropriate algorithms in order to solve the existing problems.
- Identify the trends and patterns: from the data they should be able to find out the trends and patterns which will help them to improve their business activities.
- Building appropriate models: data scientists are responsible for building appropriate models mainly to address business problems. All the business problems need to be solved by the company to improve the business. In order to solve the business problems nowadays, each company is appointing data scientists and they will build appropriate models to address the problems which are faced by a particular sector.
Qualifications required for a data scientists
The minimum qualification for a data scientist is a bachelor’s degree in data science or in computer science or any other course which is close to a field that is related to computer science. But nowadays most companies require a master’s degree to get a role of a data scientist.
Programming knowledge, deep math skills, analyzing risks, statistical analysis, communication and software engineering skills, knowledge of using could tools, and visualizing the data all are very basic skills required for becoming a data scientist.
How a data scientist uses data science to improve the business?
Let us see how the data scientists appointed by Walmart use data science to improve their business.
Walmart Use Case
- Who is Walmart?
- It is the world’s biggest retailer and has more than 20,000 stores in 28 countries.
- The reason behind Walmart's success.
- The data analysts and data scientists present at Walmart will conduct a detailed study about the customers in order to know every detail about their customers.
So they know for example if a customer buys pop tarts they might also buy cookies.
The data scientists will use the data which they get from customers and proper analysis is done in order to know what a particular customer is looking for.
Case 1 : (case study): Halloween and cookies sales
During the Halloween festival, data scientists at Walmart analyzed the customers .so they came to know that during the Halloween festival a specific type of cookie is very popular in all Walmart stores which means they found there is a connection between Halloween and sales of cookies. They also identified 2 stores at Walmart that were not at all selling the cookies due to simple stocking oversight. The data scientists identified the situation and solved the problem and which helps to grow the business.
How did data scientists come to know that a particular cookie is very popular during the Halloween festival?
- Analyzing the data and obtaining useful insights from the data to grow business
- In order to grow business, they invest a lot of money, effort, and time.
- To find the hidden patterns from the data they invest a lot of time.
- When they find out the hidden patterns or relation between two products they will start giving offers or some sorts of discounts only to attract customers.
- So Walmart uses data in a very effective manner and proper analysis of data and processing of data is done very well and useful insights are found to improve the business and to attract the business
Data scientists salary
The salary of data scientists depends upon many factors.
1. The salary package of a data scientists in India and the USA
In India and USA, there is a correlation between the salary provided for data scientists based on their degrees. When the degree is high then the salary is also high.
Ph.D. holders have the highest salary both in India as well as in the USA.
2. Salary based on experience
More experience in the relevant field will provide more salary both in USA and India.
3. Salary based on location
Salaries will be very high in big cities both in India and USA.
4. Salary based on companies
Different companies provide different salary packages. So many companies are looking for skilled data scientists. Among them, some companies provide high salaries for data scientists.
