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What is the right mix of competences for Data Scientists? First partial survey findings

The proliferation of data and the huge potentialities for companies to turn data into valuable insights are increasing more and more the demand of Data Scientists.

But what skills and educational background must a Data Scientist have? What is its positioning within the organization? What tools and programming languages does he/she mostly use?

These are some of the questions that the Observatory for Big Data Analytics of Politecnico di Milano is investigating through an international survey submitted to Data Scientists: if you work with data in your company, please support us in our research and compile this totally anonymous survey.

In few days, the questionnaire has achieved more than 200 responses worldwide. First and partial results confirm the heterogeneity of this figure in term of skills and competences: data scientists are not just programmers or computer scientists.

Actually, only one out of ten of current respondents declare themselves expert (the highest value according to the survey’s question, see the figure below) in programming; instead, among skills with greater expertise, we can find statistics and soft skills (both in about one out of three of respondents), in addition to technological and business competences (just below twenty percent of the sample).

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Considering the programming languages used during the data science’s activities, at the current state of the survey, there isn’t a prevailing choice among other, even if almost all the respondent (about 95%) affirm to use at least one of R, SQL or Phyton.

If you are a Data Scientist and you want to receive more detailed results with the main findings of the research, compile the questionnaire leaving us your email in order to contact you to send the material.

For more information about the research: Observatory for Big Data Analytics

Linkedin contact: Alessandro Piva

Alessandro Piva