Data scientist: the profession of the 21st century

If you search for "Data Scientist is" in Google search engine, it pops up a hint that you may be searching for the phrase "Data Scientist is the sexiest job." This is an excerpt from the title of an the article “Data Scientist. The Sexiest Profession of the 21st Century" published about this profession perhaps by the  most famous  Harvard Business Review in 2012. Let's try to figure out what this new "sexy" profession is.

A bit of history

The word "new" is not accidental. Although the term "data science" was coined in the 1960s, it only became fashionable and part of everyday speech 50 years later, after 2008. In 2011, the demand for data scientists on the job market grew by 15,000% (yes, exactly fifteen thousand percent). The reason for this huge demand was the rise in popularity of the Internet, which gave companies access to a huge amount of data that needed to be processed and analyzed in order to effectively manage company resources and increase revenue. In 2013, for example. According to IBM, 90% of the world's data had been created in the previous two years.

Data science has resulted in phenomena such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the Internet of Things (IoT), etc.

Data Science Today and Tomorrow

Ten years after the famous article, in July 2022, a follow-up article was published titled "Is Data Scientist Still the Sexiest Profession of the 21st Century?" The authors of the article note that a decade later, the data scientist profession is more in demand than ever among employers. As a result of the demand for artificial intelligence, most companies are hiring data scientists to build such systems. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that by 2029, data science will have more growth than almost any other field. In California, the average salary for an experienced data scientist reaches $200,000 a year (about $17,000 a month).

The profession has also undergone significant changes over the past 10 years. In particular, the job duties of a data scientist have been clarified. In addition, if before there were no educational programs for the data scientist profession, and specialists in related fields became data scientists, now there is a large selection of them, most of them for the master's degree.

Banks, insurance companies, and even medical companies and government agencies now have large teams of data scientists; large financial services firms may have hundreds of data scientists. Data science has also been used effectively to solve social crises, count and predict Covid-19 cases and deaths, create vaccines, and combat weather-related disasters.

What is the job of a data scientist?

Data science is based on statistics. However, unlike a statistician, a data scientist must understand software and be proficient in several programming languages at least at an intermediate level. Data scientists are expert analysts who use their skills to manage data, identify trends in it, and thus find solutions to business problems.

A data scientist describes the research problem, identifies the main sources of information needed, and creates a system for collecting and visualizing data, programs to analyze it, and outputs the results.

However, data scientist are primarily faced with already jumbled, unsorted, "dirty" (inaccurate, error-ridden) data from smart devices, social networks and emails, and "data cleaning" is added to their duties.

In many companies, a data scientist's job also involves consulting and suggesting solutions and new ideas, so the specialist must also have relevant knowledge of business management and/or the specifics of the company's domain.

Data scientists themselves mainly use the following programming languages in their work: Python, SQL, R, Java, Scala, Julia, JavaScript, C/C++, MATLAB, Go and SAS. They must have advanced mathematical and statistical knowledge.

Demand for data scientists in Armenia

In the Armenian market, the job of a data scientist is often perceived as a data engineer or data analyst, which requires less knowledge and skills. A data engineer mostly creates programs and models, an analyst analyzes data using existing models, and a data scientist has both skills at the same time.

Salary in the Armenian market depends on the specialist's experience and ranges from 200,000 to 3,000,000 AMD. There are hundreds of ads for data scientists on online job search platforms, indicating that they are in high demand.