The future of Data Science

“In 2019, look for data teams to become more sophisticated as their field matures, evolving to work with bigger data sets and integrating new techniques into their workflow. Advanced languages like R and Python have become a more critical part of everyday analysis and should be a centerpiece in the ‘day zero’ strategy when building any technology stack."

data Science is one of the most booming domain in technology. Regarded as the sexiest job of the 21st century, Data science is the perfect blend of analytics, technology, and mathematics which makes it suitable for aspirants from all the fields. Learning Data Science course concepts requires knowledge of mathematics which you can easily have even if you are a simple science student.

Data analytics experience is essential, machine learning helps

Data analyst roles are particularly in demand within the data science field. This is because businesses want to manipulate and cleanse their data to build reports that give a clear overview of their business.

Quantitative analysis is an important skill to analyse big data sets. It will help you to improve your ability to run experimental analysis, scale your data strategy and implement machine learning.As a broad discipline, data science often overlaps with the machine learning sector, AI and deep learning.

You may want to further research these related disciplines and borrow techniques from them to help you better manage the large unstructured data sets you will have to work with as a data scientist.

"After all, the job data scientist has been hyped for at least six years now, and college students majoring in computer science are on the rise," Flowers said. "But, as the growth in postings for data scientists shows, even with that boom, there potentially may not be enough skilled applicants."

Paying for data science practitioners

It's no surprise, given the high demand for data scientists, that salaries for the position are also elevated. According to an annual Dice Salary Survey, the role of data scientist carries an average salary of $106,000 a year.

Running the numbers on data scientists

Assuming there are around 200 graduate programs [graduating students within one to one and a half years] with each graduating 500 to 1,000 students per year, that adds to the workforce around 100,000 to 200,000 new data analytics and data science graduates. With little work experience, they will need at least one to two years to gain the experience.

If you add another 500,000 students coming from the adjacent majors -- computer science, statistics -- and data science boot camps, which vary dramatically in their quality and outcomes, the number would still not be enough to fill the need, and it is not going to close anytime soon.