14 Must-Have Skills to Become a Data Scientist (with

Resources!)
C A RE E R D AT A S C I E NC E J O BS LI S T I C LE

Overview

Understand the top 14 must-have skills to be an employable data scientist

Have a look at the suggested resources to enhance your understanding of the skills to be a data
scientist

Introduction

From Google, Microsoft, Facebook to Swiggy, Zomato, Byju’s, everybody wants to get on just one
bandwagon – Data Science and Machine Learning. There is no denying the fact that Data Science is one of
the fastest-growing fields along with its job opportunities.

The global machine learning market is expected to reach $20.83 Billion by the year 2024. That’s massive! 
According to Glassdoor, the average pay scale of a data scientist is Rs. 900k per year in India whereas the
average salary of a computer programmer is Rs. 400k per year. That is the kind of scale we are talking
about.

But how is data science seeing so much growth? The applications in this field are endless – from simple
sales prediction to all the way up to self-driven cars and personal assistants, everything is powered by Data
Science. No wonder every organization craves a talented Data Scientist.

According to a recent report by Gartner, there will be approximately 2.3 million new jobs by the year 2020
in the field of machine learning and AI. Isn’t that exciting?

But there’s a caveat!

There is a massive shortage of skilled data scientists! Yes, that’s right! Even though the jobs in the field of
data science are seeing growth, there remains a scarcity of data scientists with the right skills.

So, in this article, I am mentioning 14 skills you will require to become a successful data scientist and a
few resources to accomplish them.

Gaining all the 15 skills is a long and hard process which increases the time for you to become an industry-
ready professional. The certified AI and ML Blackbelt+ course covers up all the 15 skills in one go along with
much more, in-depth under the 1:1 guidance of an expert mentor who will help you all along.  I highly
recommend you check out this flagship course.

The 14 Must Have Data Science Skills

1. Fundamentals of Data Science

2. Statistics
3. Programming knowledge
4. Data Manipulation and Analysis
5. Data Visualization
6. Machine Learning
7. Deep Learning
8. Big Data
9. Software Engineering
10. Model Deployment
11. Communication Skills
12. Storytelling Skills
13. Structured Thinking
14. Curiosity

Data Science Skill #1: Fundamentals of Data Science

As a newcomer in data science, I did what everyone around me did – started applying machine learning
techniques like linear regression and SVM without even understanding the basics. I believe it’s all a fault of
the generic “Build your machine learning model in 5 Lines of code” but this is miles away from reality.

The first and foremost important skill you require is to understand the fundamentals of data science,
machine learning, and artificial intelligence as a whole. Understand topics like –

1. Difference between machine learning and deep learning

2. Difference between data science, business analytics, and data engineering
3. Common tools and terminologies
4. What is supervised and Unsupervised Learning
5. Classification vs regression problems

Want to get answers to all these questions? The best resource to clear your doubts is this free course – 

Introduction to AI and ML

Data Science Skill #2: Statistics and Probability

 Statistics is the grammar of data science.

When you start learning writing sentences, you must be familiar with grammar to build the right sentences
similarly statistics is an essential concept before you can produce high-quality models. Machine Learning
starts out as statistics and then advances. Even the concept of linear regression is an age-old statistical
analysis concept.

The knowledge of the concept of descriptive statistics like mean, median, mode, variance, the standard
deviation is a must. Then come the various probability distributions, sample and population, CLT, 
skewness and kurtosis, inferential statistics – hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, and so on.

Statistics is a MUST concept to become a data scientist. You can deep dive into some of these concepts
with these clear articles and their examples –

Statistics for Data Science: What is Normal Distribution?

Statistics for Analytics and Data Science: Hypothesis Testing and Z-Test vs. T-Test –
Statistics for Data Science: What is Skewness and Why is it Important?

Data Science Skill #3: Programming knowledge

Machine Learning has seen a great jump only because of the boost in computing power. Programming
provides us a way to communicate with the machines. Do you need to become the best in programming?
Not at all. But you will definitely need to be comfortable with it.

First of all, choose the programming language of your choice. Python, R, or Julia are to name a few and
each has its own set of Pros and Cons. Python is a general-purpose programming language having multiple
data science libraries along with rapid prototyping whereas R is a language for statistical analysis and
visualization. Julia offers the best of both worlds and is faster. If you are confused about which language
to choose, I have compiled a resourceful article for you –

5 Popular Data Science Languages – Which One Should you Choose for your Career?

Honestly, I have found Python to be a lot easier to perform machine learning tasks, due to the availability of
libraries and high support for deep learning. If you want to go for Python, here is a great free course to
refer to –

Python for Data Science

Data Science Skill #4: Data Manipulation and Analysis

Do you know what separates a great machine learning project from the rest? Data Wrangling and Analysis.
Although these are two different steps I have included it at the same point because of the sequence.

Data manipulation or wrangling is the step in which you clean the data and transform it into a format that
can be analyzed better in the next stages. Let’s take the example of packing your luggage. What will
happen if you throw all your clothes into your bag? You will save a few minutes but it’s not an efficient way
to do it and your clothes will also get spoiled. Instead, you can spend a few minutes ironing and putting
them stacks. It will be much more efficient and your clothes will remain in good condition.

Similarly, data manipulation and wrangling make take up a lot of time but ultimately help you in taking
better data-driven decisions. Some of the data manipulation and wrangling generally applied is – missing
value imputation, outlier treatment, correcting data types, scaling, and transformation.

Data Analysis is the step where you understand all about the data and take its “feel”. This is usually the
step where you learn a lot about the data. For example, what’re the average sales per week, Which products
are bought the most and so on.

Data Analysis is typically done in Excel, SQL, Pandas in Python and is the most important task of an
analytics professional whereas in machine learning data analysis is a step in the whole process. Here is a
list of free courses to checkout –

1. Microsoft Excel: Formulas & Functions

2. Pandas for Data Analysis in Python
3. 8 SQL Techniques to Perform Data Analysis for Analytics and Data Science

Data Science Skill #5: Data Visualization

To be honest, this is one of the most fun parts of machine learning, Data Visualization is more like an art
than a hard-wired step. There is no “One size fits all” approach here. A Data Visualization expert knows
how to build a story out of the visualizations.

To start with you must be familiar with plots like Histogram, Bar charts, pie charts, and then move on to
advanced charts like waterfall charts, thermometer charts, etc. These plots come in very handy during the
stage of exploratory data analysis. The univariate and bivariate analyses become much easier to
understand using colorful charts.

If you are wondering which tools you use during this step then don’t worry. Every language discussed
above offers a great set of libraries for advanced charts. If you want to take a step ahead and impress your
seniors then Tableau is the way to go. It offers a smooth interface with drag-and-drop functionality. I’d
recommend you to go through these resources to become an expert at data visualization –

1. Tableau for Beginners

2. 8 Data Visualization Tips to Improve Data Stories
3. 3 Ambitious Excel Charts to Boost your Analytics and Visualization Portfolio

Data Science Skill #6: Machine Learning

Finally! The skills that give inner satisfaction!

For a data scientist, machine learning is the core skill to have. Machine learning is used to build predictive
models. For example, you want to predict the number of customers you will have in the next month by
looking at the past month’s data, you will need to use machine learning algorithms.

You can start with a simple linear and logistic regression model and then move ahead to advanced
ensemble models like Random Forest, XGBoost, CatBoost, and so on. It’s a good thing to know the code for
these algorithms (which just takes 2-3 lines) but what’s most important is to know how they work. This will
help you in hyperparameter tuning and ultimately a model that gives a low error rate. Here are some free
courses to get you hooked –

1. Fundamentals of Regression Analysis

2. Ensemble Learning and Ensemble Learning Techniques
3. Getting Started with scikit-learn (sklearn) for Machine Learning

The best way to learn machine learning is by practicing on problem statements. Analytics Vidhya offers a
variety of practice problems that you can work at anytime. You can also attend HackLive – a guided
community hackathon and learn from experts as they solve problems right in front of you and make your
contribution by participating in the hackathon. You can learn more here –

Data Science Practice problems

HackLive 4

Data Science Skill #7: Deep Learning

Motivated by smart assistants or the or the cool self-driven car segment or perhaps the funny videos
created using deepfakes? All has been possible due to Deep Learning. It is a high growth vertical in the
field of Artificial Intelligence thanks to advancements in data storage capabilities and computational
advancement.

To excel in this field, you must be well versed in programming (preferably with Python) and have a good
grip on linear algebra and mathematics. To start off, you can start building basic models and then jump to
advanced models like CNN, RNN, and more.

Libraries like TensorFlow, Keras, and PyTorch are a must if you are want to build your career in deep
learning. You can check out these resources to start your career –

1. A Comprehensive Learning Path for Deep Learning in 2020

2. Getting Started with Neural Networks
3. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) from Scratch

Data Science Skill #8: Big Data

We are generating data at a rate of 2.5 Quintillions per day! Due to the rise of the internet, social media
networks, IoT there has been a sudden boom in the rate of data we are generating. This data is high in
volume, velocity, and veracity which form the 3V’s of Big Data.

Organizations have been overwhelmed with such a large amount of data and they are trying to tackle this
data by rapidly adopting Big Data Technology so that this data can be stored properly and efficiently and
used when needed.

Hadoop, Spark, Apache Storm, and Flink, Hive are some of the Frameworks/ Tools you must master.

1. 5 Popular NoSQL Databases Every Data Science Professional Should Know About
2. Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) Architecture – A Guide to HDFS for Every Data Engineer
3. Types of Tables in Apache Hive – A Quick Overview

Data Science Skill #9: Software Engineering

To write a high and good quality code that won’t cause havoc during the production stage, it is necessary
to know the basics of some of the software engineering subjects like – basic lifecycle of software
development projects, data types, compilers, time-space complexity, etc.

Writing efficient and clean code will help you in the long run and help you collaborate with your team
members. Again, you don’t need to be a software engineer but being clear with the basics will help you.

1. Basic Concepts of Object-Oriented Programming in Python

2. Inheritance in Object Oriented Programming for Python – An In-Depth Guide for Everyone
3. Methods in Python – A Key Concept of Object Oriented Programming

Data Science Skill #10: Model Deployment

Model Deployment is the most under-rated step in the machine learning lifecycle. I’ll quote about model
deployment from my previous article –

Let us take an example here. An insurance company has initiated a data science project which uses
Vehicle images from accidents to assess the extent of the damage. The data science team works day and
night to develop a model that has a near-perfect F1 score. After months of hard work, they have the model
ready and the stakeholders love its performance but what after that?

Remember that the end-user, in this case, are the insurance agents and this model needs to be used by
multiple people at the same time who are NOT data scientists. Therefore they’ll not be running a Jupyter or
Colab notebook on GPUs. This is where you need a complete process of model deployment.

This task is usually done by machine learning engineers but it varies according to the organization you are
working in. Even if it is not the job requirement of your company, it is very important to know the basics of
model deployment and why it is necessary.

1. How to Deploy Machine Learning Models using Flask (with Code!)

2. Deploy an Image Classification Model Using Flask
3. TensorFlow Serving: Deploying Deep Learning Models Just Got Easier!

Let us talk about some of the soft skills to become a successful data
scientist

In this section we discuss the necessary soft skills to become a better data scientist.

Data Science Skill #11: Communication Skills

 “Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.” – Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Data Science projects are more of a treasure hunting job, the treasure being the insights you fetch from the
data. The question is what is the price of the treasure? Well, that is decided by your stakeholders. The only
way to get a good price is to be able to communicate how insightful the results and how can this treasure
help them in improving the profits and organization.
Furthermore, the quality of a great data scientist is to formulate the problem statement. At the start of the
project, the stakeholders tell their requirements to the data scientist, and then the latter formulate a
problem statement. For example, the stakeholder needs to improve the content recommendation of their
OTT platform so that the retention time increases. This is a very vague description, it’s the job of the data
scientist to communicate the right problem statement.

Data Science Skill #12: Storytelling Skills

Imagine watching a cricket match stats, you are shown with the runs scored on each bowl in the form of a
table. Do you think you will get any important information from this? What if you are you are shown a bar
chart of runs scored in each over? Seems better. Right? It is not in human nature to understand in blocks
unless you make it interactive.

Storytelling is the utmost important acquired skill by a data scientist. Do you want to understand
Coronavirus through data? Here’s a great example of storytelling skills –

Information is Beautiful: Coronavirus Infographic

Data Science Skill #13: Structured Thinking

Let us say that you want to become a data scientist – you will break this large goal into multiple parts like
training, preparing your resume, applying for a job likewise the ability to break down a problem into
multiple parts so as to efficiently solve it is Structured thinking.

A Data Scientist always looks at problems from different perspectives. This is an acquired skill but you can
definitely work on it. Kunal Jain, Founder, and CEO of Analytics Vidhya have created a great course on it.
You can check it out here –

Structured Thinking and Communication for Data Science Professionals

Data Science Skill #14: Curiosity

Why did this happen? How did this happen? If I tweak this, will it affect the overall results? Continuously
asking questions is one of the most crucial soft skills of a data scientist. If you are dull, you may follow all
the steps of the machine learning project lifecycle but you won’t be able to reach the end goal and justify
your result.

Data Science is still evolving and it let me tell you the most important thing – Learning never stops in this
field. You master the tool one day and it gets run over by an advanced tool the next day. A data scientist
needs to be curious and always learning.

End Notes

It is exciting to be a data scientist in this decade. A lot of advancements await in the future. In this article,
we discussed the 14 most important skills (hard and soft) needed to become a successful data scientist.

Do you have any other skills that you wish were on this list to become a data scientist? Let me know in the
comments!

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scientist-with-resources/

Ram Dewani
Product Growth Analyst at Analytics Vidhya. I’m always curious to deep dive into data, process it,
polish it so as to create value. My interest lies in the field of marketing analytics.