Learning Data Science and the rise of the citizen data scientist

In most cases, Data Science it’s about people: know how your consumers or
costumers think will lead you to craft techniques that persuade them to buy, to
send a message or whatever action you need. Then, the crucial step, build all
your learnings into software. For students majoring in data science, it’s
required to have at least master’s degree give the innovation that is taking
place in the area.

As the curriculum of the classes gets more complex with teachings on Hadoop,
Apache Spark as well as machine learning and data visualization, the future
looks promising: Forbes reports a clear shortage of data scientists that makes
the career one of the most in-demand fields. Of course, it comes with other
skills since the data science degree includes courses such as mathematics,
statistics, computer science, engineering and, of course, programming
languages such as Python.

All this leads to the apparition of another figure in the field: a ‘power user’
capable of analysis and analytical tasks but outside of the expertise on
mathematics and statistics, as Gartner names it, a citizen data scientist. The
great advantage of this persons is the diverse perspectives they have that
could bring a disruptive and transformative power over the company to
accomplish its own goals.

As the panorama widens we can learn a thing or two to prepare ourselves for
the future: investing in data science it’s -in the short term- a way to get closer
to the customers, and in the long term, getting ahead of the future to come.