7 Data Careers You Should Be Aware of
Data careers are on the increase on a daily basis and it would be great to know some of the options available to you if data fascinates you.
Below are 7 careers related to data. Find out what they are about and what is involved for anyone who chooses to start a career in any of them.
Data Analyst
For data analysts, they start with facts and figures and they know how to present data in tables, charts, graphs and graphics. They collect, process and perform statistical analyses of data. Just as their name implies, they are very good at analyzing data, identifying trends and making predictions of the future.
To be a successful data analyst, you must have a good working knowledge of statistical tools and techniques.
Data Scientist
Data scientists are experts who can gather unstructured and messy data, refine it, analyze, model, interpret (and visualize), communicate the insights from the data so that individuals, companies and organizations can make sense of it and use it for actionable purposes.
According to sas, data scientists are part mathematician (most times, statisticians), part computer scientist and part trend-spotter and some usually start out as data analysts. Data scientists use programming languages like R for their work and database management is also a skill they possess, so it’s not awkward when they talk about SQL. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are areas where they also shine.
If you’re looking to start a career in data science, find advice from two data scientists to aspiring data scientists.
Data Engineer
Data engineers are software engineers that deal with big data from different sources. They are data professionals who manage big data and they build big data warehouses for data scientists to do their work.
They write complex code to query data ensuring that data is accessible and optimized for the goals of an institution. As engineers that they are, expect them to deal majorly with design and architecture.
Data Journalist
Data journalists are basically journalists who employ data to tell compelling stories. They sometimes do this with the use of infographics. They collect unique, original data sets, clean the data, analyze it, visualize it to find interesting patterns that can be used to come up with stories.
The skills of a data scientist or data analyst are transferrable to data journalism, and proficiency in writing and reporting is a useful and important skill for every data journalist.
Data Manager
Data management typically deals with how non-persistent and persistent states of the application are stored, manipulated and kept consistent, organized, stored, secured.
Database management is at the core of their job making them sometimes have a similar job to database administrators. Data managers need skills in coding to maintain databases with maximum security. They are also in charge of how data flows within an organization.
These are questions that data managers answer frequently:
- Where will you store data? In one or multiple locations?
- How will your data be kept consistent across locations?
- How is the retrieval of your data kept performant?
- How does your data storage scale with performance?
Data Miner
Data miners also referred to as data mining analysts or data mining specialists possess the great skill of extracting knowledge and patterns from data — big data, large data — a large volume of data. Data mining is mostly confused with extraction or mining of data but it is rather the extraction of patterns and knowledge from data.
Data miners are discoverers of unusual patterns, clusters or group of data, unusual records, which can be useful in making predictions. They discover knowledge in databases. This knowledge extraction is usually useful to businesses and organizations.
Data Architect
A data architect is one who designs, create, deploy, protect and manages data architecture. Though it sounds closely linked to what a data engineer does, the difference is that a data architect conceptualizes and visualizes what the data architecture framework or blueprint while the data engineer builds the architecture.
Know any data career that’s not a part of the ones listed above? Feel free to share in the comment section.
