What Do You Need to Become a Data Scientist in 2020 vs 2019 vs 2018?

Since we are talking data science, the only logical way to approach the question is to ask the data. And that’s what we’ve done for 3 consecutive years. Since 2018 we have explored 1001 data scientist LinkedIn profiles to uncover the most interesting trends in the data science field.

In this video we will go through the most important findings from the last 3 years. In fact, we have created a very cool and interactive PowerBI dashboard which you can use to analyze the data yourself here.

According to the data, the average data scientist from 2018 to 2020 is a male with a second-tier degree, coming from a quantitative background, which is not necessarily data science or computer science. Their preferred programming language is Python, but they’d often know R and SQL. Many of the new data scientist positions are being filled by people who are already data scientists, so the field feels much more saturated. Getting into data science still looks like a great opportunity, but the ‘data scientist’ position becomes more and more exclusive.

Our sample shows that at least 80% of the people held a minimum of a Master’s degree. This isn’t as surprising, considering data science is a field that expects advanced know-how from the person — usually achieved by graduate or postgraduate types of education, or independent advanced research in other cases.