Martin Haagoort, CEO of Intellerts, answers the question: Who is a Data Scientist?
“Who is a Data Scientist?
Apparently, it’s one of the most sexiest job in the world. Everyone apparently wants to be a data scientist and maybe that’s a good thing.
Well, what is it exactly? Is it someone that has so many skills that really is super duper programmer and at the same time a perfect communicator?
Or are we all data scientists?
I think we’re all data scientists.
If you look and unpack what a data scientist does, it observes reality, it tries to make sense of reality, it tries to model reality in such a way that we can deduct and predict and understand. So, we gather data. We take data. We manage data. Combine data. And we start to look at results. We massage. We clean. We maybe even curate data.
We do that in our every day job. Everyone does that. Even though you might not be very technical, you’re still in the process of analyzing, in the process of trying to make sense of things and then to predict what’s going to happen next. In all the things we do.
And we all need to get more into data.
Maybe we don’t all need to be very technical, but we need to better understand the world around us from a data perspective. We should not leave it alone to the hands technicians that have a certain skill. We need to adapt it ourselves and understand data at a deeper level.
So don’t forget you are a data scientist sooner or later. And it will help you to better understand your business. Better help you to make decisions in the future. And you can better be a counterpart to the technical guys around you, that’s it”.