Data Science Skills Survey 2015

On 3 Mar, 2016 By Michael.Walker 0 Comments
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Data Science Skills Survey 2015

 

Business Over Broadway conducted a survey in 2015 of over 620 data professionals showing 25 different skills. Top 2 skills were communication and managing structured data. Bottom 2 skills were big and distributed data and cloud management.

The survey concludes the top skills for project success are data mining and using visualization tools. For business managers the key skills are statistics, machine learning and big and distributed data. For Developers, the critical skills are product design and development, systems administration and back-end programming. For Creatives, the important skills include math, business development and graphical models.

The 10 most important data science skills to project success were:

 

  1. S - Data Mining and Viz Tools (corr with satisfaction = .44)

  2. S - Statistics and statistical modeling (.39)

  3. T - Machine Learning (.38)

  4. S - Science/Scientific Method (.38)

  5. M - Algorithms and Simulations (.37)

  6. M - Bayesian Statistics (.37)

  7. M - Optimization (.33)

  8. S - Data Management (.33)

  9. T - NLP and text mining (.32)

  10. M - Math (.31)

The 10 data science skills that best predict project success for Business Managers (i.e., leader, business person, entrepreneur) are:

 

  1. S - Statistics and statistical modeling (corr with satisfaction = .44)

  2. S - Data Mining and Viz Tools (.43)

  3. T - Machine Learning (.39)

  4. T - Big and distributed data (.39)

  5. S - Science/Scientific Method (.38)

  6. M - Bayesian Statistics (.35)

  7. M - Optimization (.33)

  8. T - Managing Structured data (.32)

  9. P - Systems Administration (.31)

  10. T - Managing Unstructured data (.30)

 

The 10 data science skills that best predict project success for Developers (i.e., developers or engineers) are:

 

  1. B - Product design and development (corr with satisfaction = .36)

  2. P - Systems Administration (.34)

  3. P - Back-end Programming (.34)

  4. S - Data Mining and Viz Tools (.31)

  5. P - Front-end Programming (.28)

  6. B - Governance and Compliance (.25)

  7. S - Data Management (.24)

  8. S - Communication (.23)

  9. P - Database Administration (.20)

  10. T - NLP and text mining (.20)

 

The 10 data science skills that best predict project success for Creatives (i.e., Jack of all trades, artist, hacker) are:

 

  1. M - Math (corr with satisfaction = .51)

  2. S - Data Mining and Viz Tools (.39)

  3. B - Business development (.34)

  4. M - Graphical Models (.32)

  5. M - Optimization (.31)

  6. T - Managing Structured data (.31)

  7. P - Database Administration (.28)

  8. M - Algorithms and Simulations (.23)

  9. T - Machine Learning (.22)

  10. M - Bayesian Statistics (.21)

 

Note that data technologies and advanced data science techniques are rapidly changing and innovating. New tech and cognitive computing will likely change the critical skill sets required in the future.