day they may analyze TV channels data to find
out what drives their business and on another
day they may be analyzing text data to decipher
social media responses to their promotion.
Though the job involves handling varied data,
some common patterns do emerge that can
be applied elsewhere. Sometimes though, the
analyzed data may spring some surprises. For
example, polling data analyses showed that of
the 88 people at Modakkuruchi, Tamil Nadu, who
contested for the elections, did not even vote for
themselves, something strange and shocking.
Another one that teachers who have high pass
percentage of students in their course don’t
grade them honestly. Another one that, people
taking electric or water meter readings don’t
always visit the premises and cook up numbers
that are typically multiples of 10. And, children
born in August score much more that children
born in July.
Sometimes, data analysis may also throw up
counter-intuitive insights. For example, once
a data analyst told an American wholesale
retailer’s credit card programme to invert their
loyalty reward system and reward low spenders
instead of the higher ones. This is because, the
analyst identified that the highest spenders
as mostly re-sellers who did not need to be
incentivized. This saved the company millions of
dollars (Times of India).
What the future holds for data scientists?
The future looks bright for a data scientist. “Data
Scientist” has become a popular occupation
with Harvard Business Review dubbing it “The
Sexiest Job of the 21st Century”. McKinsey &
Company has projected a global demand excess
of 1.5 million new data scientists. Accenture
Research predicted 32000 analytics jobs in India
by the year end. Besides greater opportunity for
employment, they are also paid better. Randstad
reports that pay hikes in analytics industry is
50% more than IT and the median salary for
analytics in India is over 13 LPA (Payscale.com).
The increase in demand for data scientists has
also opened the doors of many universities for
offering master’s courses in data science. Many
startups in India are now offering data science
courses and boot camps to train data analysts.
There is only one way the future of data scientists
and course to train them can go – North.
Conclusion
The foregoing discussion clearly establishes the
growing importance of data scientists. Besides
being paid handsomely, there are opportunities
galore. For the young aspiring post-graduates
or graduates who are good at numbers and
can visualize pattern latent in them have good
prospects. This is also opportune moment for
education institutions to offer specialized courses
to prepare the students for this profession.
This profession will play an important role in
predicting the future or the emerging trends; it
will be of immense value to policy makers and
in strategic decision making in the industry.
They may also forecast the spread of infectious
diseases, the occurrence of natural phenomenon
and stock market behaviour etc. Thus making
sense of the data available, one may say that
the future of the data scientist is bright.
(My sincere thanks to Dr. Swaroop Reddy for his numerous inputs.)