5 Analytical skills you must acquire as a data scientist

A Data scientist plays very crucial roles in industry. Their decisions drives the next steps of industry. As a Data scientist, It's very important that you have very strong analytical skills. You must have sharp idea about what to look inside data, what to filter out, and what to work upon.

Analytical skills comes from experience. The more you seek patterns, the more you play with data, the more you'll understand. In this article, I'll talk about 5 analytical skills that you can acquire to become a high performing data scientist. You may like to mention them on you resume as well, if you are preparing it to apply for any data scientist role.

Image by David Schwarzenberg from Pixabay

1. Research and analysis

The ability to dig into the original sources of data and fetch out connections is considered as research. While working with data provided to you from your peers is a part of your job, to seek and research on sources of data and find out new ways to collect more meaningful data, is current need. Do acquire this skill, if you want to stand out of the crowd and excel as a data scientist.

2. Problem solving

Problem solving is the art of thinking. You will encounter problems, or typos, or issues for which there are no straight forward answers on Google. You must be having ability to soak knowledge from huge documentations, forms, your teammates and countless Youtube videos. That's how it goes, that's how it is done. You should have an attitude to solve problem quickly by learning from a lot of sources.

3. Creativity

I define creativity as an individual's ability to mix knowledge and come up with something meaningful, unique and useful out of it. To be creative is like being a gem nowadays. You can ace your daily work by your creativity and new ideas. To be creative, you must explore things. The more kind of things you pass through the more your mind will learn, the more creative you'll become in the process. Read books, watch movies, watch tv shows, listen to TedX lectures, listen to audiobooks, talk to your peers. That's how you become more creative.

4. Decision Making

You should be able quickly analyze the situation, connect it with your knowledge and come up with a decision. A lot of data scientists, either provide vague decisions or they are never sure what does their results say. You should be able to provide reasoning behind your decisions. 

5. Time Management

If you come up with the solution after it's need is gone, it's not useful at all. On the other hand you wasted your time and resources of organization as well. You should manage time wisely, plan for the things that needs to be done, plan for the steps that needs to be followed and then write down estimated time as well against each step you are going to follow. This way you can know when you are going too far, and you might be late to deliver. 

These were 5 skills you should acquire as a data scientist. I hope these will be helpful for you.