Exploring the Job Competencies of Data Scientists Using Online Job Posting

Xiangdan Jin, Seung Ik Baek

Abstract


As the global business environment is rapidly changing due to the 4th industrial revolution, new jobs that did not exist before are emerging. Among them, the job that companies are most interested in is ‘Data Scientist’. As information and communication technologies take up most of our lives, data on not only online activities but also offline activities are stored in computers every hour to generate big data. Companies put a lot of effort into discovering new opportunities from such big data. The new job that emerged along with the efforts of these companies is data scientist. The demand for data scientist,  a promising job that leads the big data era, is constantly increasing, but its supply is not still enough. Although data analysis technologies and tools that anyone can easily use are introduced, companies still have great difficulty in finding proper experts. One of the main reasons that makes the data scientist’s shortage problem serious is the lack of understanding of the data scientist’s job. Therefore, in this study, we explore the job competencies of a data scientist by qualitatively analyzing the actual job posting information of the company. This study finds that data scientists need not only the technical and system skills required of software engineers and system analysts in the past, but also business-related and interpersonal skills required of business consultants and project managers. The results of this study are expected to provide basic guidelines to people who are interested in the data scientist profession and to companies that want to hire data scientists.

  

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References


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