Data scientist called the sexiest job

If you ask my 12-year-old daughter who is the sexiest person, her answer will be Tiger Shroff. He’s an upcoming Bollywood star. It’s because of his six-pack abs and muscles.

But if I want to compete with this Bollywood star, albeit without the six-pack body, I may have to take up a new job: data scientist. DJ Patil and Thomas H Davenport first coined the term in 2008 and called it “the sexiest job of the 21st century”. This year, Glassdoor, a well-known recruiting site, named data scientist the No 1 job in the United States.

Jokes aside, a data scientist’s job is pretty daunting. His or her job is to make sense of large volumes of data while being submerged in it.

Forget Excel spreadsheets. Think digital.

According to a 2014 white paper by International Data Corporation on how the digital universe will look by 2020, it will contain nearly as many digital bits as there are stars in the universe, or 44 trillion gigabytes.

It’s not only the sheer volume of data, it’s the need to analyse quickly mainly unstructured data such as e-mails, photos, videos, voice and of course structured data. The data scientist’s role is to draw information from data, giving organisations knowledge and insights (wisdom). Companies that can do this have wisdom that their competitors don’t.

To be successful, a data scientist’s job requires specific skill sets. They must be adept with computer programming languages like Python or R, have excellent knowledge of statistics and strong business acumen, and love to analyse things and be a great communicator.

After all, the data scientist’s job is to deliver insights to the audience and capture their imagination.

A data scientist is like the superhero of wisdom. They discover things that sometimes even customers don’t know that they need.

Let me give you an example. Recently, I was on a trip with my elder daughter to Switzerland. Our plane was delayed for an hour. Her smartphone informed her of our flight delay.

Hell, my wife knew before we did that our flight was delayed. She received periodic updates on flight status for up to 48 hours before our flight was to take off. (Let’s leave privacy issues for discussion on another day.)

To say that my wife was super-impressed is an understatement. This is data science: It’s the ability to acquire, process and leverage data in a timely fashion. It could be in the form of new products and services or better efficiencies.

Here comes the difficult part. There aren’t enough superheroes to take up data-scientist jobs. According to McKinsey Global Institute, the US alone will have a shortage of 140,000 or more data scientists by 2018. Top US schools have launched data science programmes in recent years. Thailand has none, although Mahidol University’s faculty of science provides excellent online data-science resources.

Other than looking for external hires and consultants, Thai companies should look at transitioning their top data analysts to data scientists, putting them through online courses and assigning them to work on big data projects. This is where you bring in your human-resources department to assist in your quest to master data science.

Suvit Chansrichawla is next-generation HR consultant under the brand Serendipity & Co, partner of the Curve Group in Thailand.