How do I shift to a data science career

I get this question a lot – How do I shift to a data science career. I have been doing data analysis since 2004 (in SAS) when we used to call it business analytics , and since 2007 in R, Since 2014 in Python, by when we re branded business analytics as data science. So here are a few basics to people trying to SHIFT to data science.

My answer is learn coding, learn math, and most importantly know when to use what for insights. Data scientists are as good as the insights they create or miss not the code they write.

See this first

A slideshare I put forward last year for Summer School

Do this self examination-

What are you good at – programming , stats, or business
What are you bad at- programming , stats or business
What can you learn and at what proficiency

Learning Programming

Learning R, SAS, Python is easy but there is a confusing clutter of resources out there on the internet.

SAS Language -should be learnt from SAS University Edition and for the SAS Certification Exam.

Dont wanna be SAS Certified (its just 100$ psst)

Here is some free SAS Training by Decisionstats

There is no certification in R or Python, though Hadoop has it just like SAS has it.

For R- learn R and RStudio till you can master some of the code here

http://rpubs.com/ajaydecis

Screenshot from 2016-08-23 10-48-29

or see all the R packages here at CRAN VIEWS https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/

For Python-

A shorter tutorial on Python by the author is here

http://www.statisticsviews.com/details/feature/8868901/A-Tutorial-on-Python.html

Learn PANDAS and SCIKIT-LEARN example https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/A-gallery-of-interesting-IPython-Notebooks

Learning Statistics and Techniques

Data Mining in R

http://rattle.togaware.com/rattle-examples.html

Where to learn machine learning

http://scikit-learn.org/stable/tutorial/basic/tutorial.html

Learning Business

This comes with experiences and domain research and study.

I hope this helps. I will follow with specific answers to specific career questions in data science soon.

Author: Ajay Ohri

http://about.me/ajayohri View all posts by Ajay Ohri

One thought on “How do I shift to a data science career”

Data Science is a very desirable field for starting a career and due to its high demand many people are now trying to shift their career to Data Science but it can be a very difficult process but this article helps clear out a lot of questions and doubts which will make the process much easier.