I wrote about data scientists while back, which seems to be a field that involves the analysis of large amounts of data and the tools involved in this work. The definition of this area is a little nebulous, but that hasn't stopped companies from looking for people to work in this area. There are jobs for data scientists, and perhaps for interesting, there seems to be more and more jobs for people to work with "big data".
This article shows a huge trend up in the "big data" keywords in job listings. That makes sense as I think the data growth has far outpaced the ability of tools to work with large datasets. Excel had a problem with large amounts of data until recently, and most of the other tools used are either very expensive or home grown.
Many of the people subscribing to this newsletter are technical people, those that work to form the computer into a tool that someone else can use to do their job. It's an interesting job, and one I hope you enjoy, but there are some of you out there that would like to do more with data than just find ways to help others query that data. Perhaps a data scientist is a job that you would like to move into at some point.
This is an area that I suspect many companies will want to focus more efforts on in the future, and I think that being a DBA who knows how to query data and find patterns gives you a head start on moving into a position that can be challenging, fun, and perhaps most importantly, without much after hours work.
If you like statistics, patterns, and helping your company actually make use of the information in data, perhaps a data scientist might be the position for you.
Steve Jones
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