What is a Data Scientist?

There is currently a huge shortage of data scientists, with Britain expected to create an average of 56,000 big data jobs a year until 2020, but what exactly does a data scientist do?

In short, a data scientist’s job is to translate big data into insights that will help the business make better strategic decisions through mining and interpreting line upon line of data within data sets. They take raw data and pair it with analysis which they can then unlock insights from and begin to identify trends, making the data much more meaningful and valuable to the organisation. It’s essential that data scientists have knowledge of the industry they are working in so that they can contextualise their findings.

For example, companies in the retail sector have data scientists to gain insights from their datasets to help them better understand their different audience groups so that they can target them with products and offerings specific to their tastes. Companies are becoming increasingly dependent on big data to make decisions that impact their sales, operations and workforce and they rely on their data scientists to give them the insights to make these decisions.

If you have an analytical mind and like finding patterns and trends in data, a career as a data scientist may be perfect for you. ‘How do I get my foot in the door?’ I hear you ask. Well, that’s where the Creative Data programme comes in.

Join us at our 3-day immersive academy in Edinburgh to explore the scope of career paths available in data including data scientist roles within the data and marketing industry. Or, if you’re looking to get a taste of what working in data and marketing is like, come a long to one of our 1-day hackathon style laboratories.

Click here to apply now!