Data scientist has been billed as the ‘sexiest job of the 21st Century’ – but who are data scientists, and how can you get in on the action?

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Guest post by Michael Koploy of SoftwareAdvice.com

By now, pretty much everyone has heard that “Big Data” will be the next “big thing” to revolutionise how we work, live and communicate.

But who will manage the Walmart database that contains over 2.5 petabytes of data from the retailer’s 1 million customer transactions per hour? Who at YouTube is analyzing the 48 hours of video uploaded to its website every minute?

For every Big Data problem, the solution often rests on the shoulders of a data scientist. The role of the data scientist is similar in responsibility to the Wall Street “quants” of the 80s and 90s – now, these data experienced are tasked with the management of databases previously thought too hard to handle, and too unstructured to derive any value.

The sexiest job of the 21^st Century?

Thomas Davenport and D.J. Patil brought the data scientist into the national spotlight in their October 2012 Harvard Business Review article: Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century. Job trends data from Indeed.com confirms the rise in popularity Continue reading →