Essentially, data science is the study of the use of data to generate informed business decisions and also plays an integral role as a building block to help businesses create new products. Data scientist as a job role is definitely one of the “trendy” jobs for the coming years and looks like it will remain as one of the coolest jobs to have for some time. A typical day for a data scientist obviously varies from one industry to another; however, data scientists operate mostly by collecting, collating, interpreting and analyzing streams of data and making it palatable for companies to utilize it as tools that can lead to optimizing resources or increasing productivity or sales numbers. As mentioned above, data science has been instrumental in industries such as healthcare, education, banking and finance, e-commerce. Let’s delve further in the know-hows of data science below.
What makes it instrumental now, going into the future?
Data makes the world go round (at least for some time now) and yet, we barely scratched the surface of it. Data science isn’t something new but in recent years, it has served a magnanimous impact on industries that have garnered general interest in this field.
Data science application comes into play in the banking and finance industry when it comes to risk management. Data science is applied here to identify, monitor as well as prioritize the risks. Apart from that, it provides companies with unique insight into what patterns and results they can expect in the foreseeable future. Sales estimates, inventory requirements, materials management, personnel requirements, project execution analysis, project win analysis, budget requirements, and wage structures are some of the issues tackled with the application of data modelling.
Data science is also no stranger in the medical field. It is heavily applied in areas that include drug development, which encompasses R&D, testing and manufacturing, to disease research. Apart from this, you may even experience the impact of data science whenever you call for a virtual assistant on your gadgets! Yes, that is the result of data science application in regular daily lives we may or may not have realised. The use of speech recognition techniques to perform tasks like sending messages, browsing the web, playing music, making calls, etc. There cannot be a better way to proceed with this than by employing data science techniques.
E-commerce sites are our best friends in times of lockdowns and global pandemic, thanks to its ready accessibility 24/7 to nurse minor breakdowns from draining periods of online school and WFH. Data science also plays its crucial part here especially when it deduces data from all your browsing activity, and curates a list of product recommendations at check-out which we tend to succumb to.
What if you want to participate in this rapid data science wave?
In order to break it down to the basics, one needs to be familiar with the type of programming language that is heavily used in the world of data science. A quick Google search would demonstrate that Python, Java and R are some of the sought-after programming languages of data scientists. With the current heat from rapid talent development initiatives that are taking place globally, courses whether it is free or premium, are ubiquitous. It is never a bad idea to have a beginner's understanding of Python or Java under your belt as it would definitely reflect as a shiny token in your resume. Should there be an opportunity for one to change industries in the age of reskilling and upskilling, courses such as these are a step forward to enhance employability.
Furthermore, even when your career trajectory does not necessarily involve switching to data science completely, there are definitely some valuable transferable skills to pick up when one takes up a course or two on data science. Acquired data-analyzing skills is remarkable as it enables the individual to explore in-depth concepts of data science and its analysis and gather powerful insights from data, which is applied in nearly every industry. It also gives a snapshot into machine learning models to predict future customer or market behaviour based on past trends. In turn, this would help your businesses reach optimal outcomes based on your very own set of data.
Is data science one to sustain, dodging the age of rapid digitalization? If anything, data science is one that has been and will be evolving with the world for the coming advances of technology. Organizations worldwide will be using technologies like statistics and numbers to facilitate rapid conceptualization for decision making. Thus, we are going to continue to see industries adopting data analytics immensely in the near future to achieve better ROI.
