Data Science: Lucrative New Age Career

Charlotte Stevens hails from the Rhondda Valley in Wales but has found a home in London with her sister and two flat mates. Growing up in financially straitened circumstances meant that she always had a desire for financial security at the back of her mind. A university education left her with little clue about applying herself. Surely not a profile for a great career!

But then Charlotte found she had an aptitude for Data Science – the journey started by signing up on Coursera.org to the Johns Hopkins specialisation track in Data Science. The courses and a change in job ensured that she found the financial security she yearned for – her income rose to three times the average of others her age.

Charlotte credits the e-learning she acquired on data science via Coursera for changing her life. She is one among millions around the world transforming their lives by upskilling and reskilling themselves for the new age economies blooming worldwide. These economies are built on cutting edge technologies such as data science, machine learning, IoT, artificial intelligence and the like.

A search for “Data Science Johns Hopkins” throws up 57 courses on Coursera – an incredible range of courses, tracks and certifications from one of the premier institutes for learning in the world. The data science track Charlotte took consists of the concepts and tools students will need throughout the entire data science pipeline. These include asking the right kinds of questions, making inferences and publishing results. Learners also learn to apply the skills they have acquired by building a data product using real-world data. The bonus? Upon completion of the course, students will have a demonstrable portfolio of code and assets that they can use to showcase their mastery of the subject.

According to datajobs.com, Data Science is “...a multidisciplinary blend of data inference, algorithm development, and technology in order to solve analytically complex problems.” It is a science that has evolved to help modern-day societies answer the question “We have lots of data – now what?” Technological advances such as IoT (Internet of Things), hardware advances that allow for seamless storage of petabytes of data, business advances such as massive data farms by organisations such as Amazon Web Services and others all have ensured that companies and governments around the world are sitting on massive amounts of data. Data Analysts like Charlotte work to unlock real value from the data, performing functions such as cluster analysis, segmentation, etc to derive insights from the data. These insights are used by analysts to make recommendations not just to improve processes, products and services but also to improve the design of new products with advanced capabilities. 

Data science is one of those ‘hot’ areas where the demand for talent far outstrips the supply. The financial remuneration for data scientists is huge, prompting many professionals to upskill and move into the field. Here are some recent statistics on salaries for individual contributors in this field:

Higher up at the managerial level, the payoffs are even larger:

Such data are testament to the fact that Charlotte made the right choice in opting for Data Science!

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