Ever since the emergence of big data, there has been a significant advancement in the field of data science and the Harvard Business Review dubbed it as the hottest job of the 21st century. The primary skills required to make a career in this field are statistical knowledge and programming.
You can consider these technical skills as an entry ticket to the data science industry. Millions of people across the world have completed data science training to acquire these skills. Since there are no barriers to acquiring technical knowledge, data scientists are expected to have a certain level of capabilities.
In this article, we will be discussing the top traits of a highly efficient data scientist.
Inquisitive
In order to be a data scientist, you must have an unquenchable thirst for learning new skills and gaining new knowledge. This is a must for the constantly evolving and rapidly growing field that requires a desire to learn and understand.
Wanting to learn new data science techniques is an important element that can help data scientists by enhancing their analytical capabilities. By accumulating collective knowledge, data scientists can identify the logical interconnections between bodies of knowledge.
Moreover, having an inquisitive nature expresses your urge to explore and ask questions. This helps data scientists in avoiding cognitive biases while solving problems. For example, you might have the tendency of concluding that causation exists while identifying the correlation between two variables.
But, with the understanding that the statistical concept doesn’t intend to discover causation. An inquisitive data scientist will make further explorations for learning and understanding the relationship between the two variables.
Detail-oriented
An important skill in Data science is programming. So, you will have to participate in the debugging exercise in every step while developing a data science solution including data processing and performance evaluation.
However, when you combine data science technical breadth with programming, it introduces a lot of complexities while coding a data science pipeline. A data scientist will have to give a lot of attention to small details.
Many times, a small coding error can evolve into a critical issue and yield unexpected analysis results. Apart from diligent debugging while programming, a data scientist will spend a lot of time examining the data quality before feeding it into the machine learning algorithms. During this time, being detail-oriented will help in creating high-quality works.
Critical reasoning
A data scientist is responsible for analyzing data objectively for proving or disproving a hypothesis while solving a real-world problem. Through critical reasoning, they are empowered to cultivate rational and clear thinking about what they should do.
Apart from uncovering hidden insights, they also have to systematically solve a problem by framing questions using data science techniques.
While dealing with a large volume of information, a data scientist has to create and test a hypothesis in experimentation and confirm their theory. They have to be skeptical and not accept a statement at its face value. It is their job to look for answers that are reflecting the truth and not the ones that are available readily.
Creativity
Data science’s essence is using data for discovering how things operate differently to produce more value. That is why they need creativity. It empowers data scientists to create something out of nothing. For example, in the feature engineering process, the performance of an ML model is enhanced. In order to do so, vast imagination is required.
Moreover, creativity is a crucial element required to develop intelligent visualizations capable of delivering insights to the stakeholders efficiently.
This shows that the designing process is well beyond the technical capabilities of data science. Even though data science is driven by logic, it is creativity that helps them in framing problems from an unexplored, different angle.
Communication
In order to develop a data science solution, data scientists have to use highly complex techniques for gathering data, training ML models, etc. Therefore, an efficient data scientist must be able to translate analysis outputs into actionable business insights and communicate them to business stakeholders.
How well the analysis outputs have been communicated will determine the data science solution’s impact. That is why data scientists must be able to logically and emotionally engage stakeholders. They must know how to leverage their language for communicating with stakeholders effectively.
Proper communication with the stakeholders will encourage them to participate effectively during the ideation as well as validation of results. There are many data scientists who create a compelling story and are empathetic while presenting facts and figures so that they can be understood by everyone.
Open-minded
In the field of data science, data engineers, business executives, and data scientists collaborate together. In order to be productive while working, it is important to be open-minded. This quality will help a data scientist in suspending judgment and allow a continuous exploration of the best solution.
Even while working with a hypothesis, it is crucial to understand that there are other hypotheses capable of leading to better results. A highly efficient data scientist is open-minded that allows them to observe emerging patterns even when they are different from the initial predictions.
Top 4 Consulting Resume TipsPatience
One of the most important traits a data scientist can have is patience. There are a lot of elements in the data science solution. From technical elements to programming to tuning ML models, it is a highly complicated process.
Regardless of how good a data scientist is they are bound to face weak model performance and programming bugs. That is why having patience is a must for someone to be successful in the field of data science. Patience is what will transform a data scientist’s technical abilities into achievements.
Continuous effort is required to create a working data science solution. On the journey of becoming a data science professional, failure is inevitable. During these testing times, patience is what is needed for adopting a positive attitude and reframing problems to search for an optimal solution.
Anyone with access to the internet can become a data scientist. But, it is these traits that separate a good data scientist from a great data scientist.
With these traits, a data scientist can lift their capabilities to a whole nother level and stand apart from their competition. The best way to inculcate these habits is through practice. Join a data science course in Delhi and transform into a better data scientist.
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1 Comment
Thank you for sharing such a nice and interesting blog and really very helpful article.