Some months ago, I wrote a post dedicated to new Data Scientists, giving my personal recommendation about several books that are pure gold, and great tools like Python, R, and Apache Hadoop. Right now, today is a new day for this kind of professional; yes, because, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) published a great article talking about the Data Scientist, written by Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil; and I think that both did an incredible job in this writing, believe me, you should read it, you will not regreat. So, I want to dedicate these lines to the raising quantity of jobs with a shining title: “Data Scientist”. If you look today in any Job Board like Linkedin, AOL Careers , Indeed, SimplyHired, Technology Ladders or Dice, and you do a little search about this title, you will find more than 250 new open positions everyday, doing only the search in U.S. If you expand the search to more countries like UK, Germany, Ireland, India, China, Netherlands, the numbers grow like a completed madness.
Looking for Data Science open jobs?
So, this is the right time to apply for this new kind of job; of course, if you have the skills and will to do it; I encourage you to do it, you will not waist your time. But first, again, read the article at HBR, and then, I recommend you to see a great video from Drew Conway talking about how to hire a Data Scientist. After that, you can search in the top companies that are looking all time to fulfil these roles: Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Amazon, Ebay, The New York Stock Exchange or new names like TapJoy, Tapad, EMC/Greenplum, RocketFuel, HubSpot, Cloudera, the company created by the former Data Scientist Manager at Facebook, Jeff Hammerbacher, one of my heroes in this field, Kaggle, the guys that “made of Data Science a sport”, LevelUp Analytics (which is in stealth mode right now), the company created by Jonathan Goldman and some brilliant guys, MetaMarkets Group, the company managed by Michael Driscoll, another of my heroes, and many more good companies that are focused on big data analytics. So, this is a good time to be a Data Scientist or begin to think how to become on one. In the HBR post, you will find some initiatives to become on a Data Scientist, so, third time: read the blog post.
But why now?
It’s a critical question that many managers is doing to themself, thinking about why they don’t look this kind of professional before. Why now? Easy, this is the era of the Data Revolution, where the numbers are increasing with time exponentially, and more companies and organization need all available information to run its business; for that reason, they need us, they need people with the skill to analyze huge quantity of data, and show to them the results in a way that they could understand; that’s the main job of the Data Scientist. Examples are many:
- How do you think that Netflix obtain more and more customers every day? They gave 1 millions of dollars for an recommendation algorithm to improve its recommendations to its customers, which then it was reflected on the growing revenues of the company
- If you read the HBR’s blog post, you saw that Jonathan Goldman on his days at Linkedin, created the “People that May know” application, based on data mining, graph processing and statistical analytics techniques
- Facebook did the same thing creating the “People that you may know” application. They are looking for Data Scientist too: look this article at VentureBeat about this topic
Behind all these applications are many system engineers, software developers and data scientist. So, What do you waiting for? If you like this kind of challenges and problems, you should consider to become on a Data Scientist, you will see at the end that the journey is challenging but fun. I’m now in this journey, and I’m enjoying every moment. Happy job hunting !!! Marcos Luis Ortíz Valmaseda about.me/marcosortiz @marcosluis2186
