Becoming a Data Scientist as a Career Changer

Why also Newcomers are in Demand

The job profile Data Scientist is still very young and has only emerged in the last 20 years only. Many universities already feature Data Science as a regular course in their study programs, but the demand in the job market is much higher than all the universities can provide yet. For this reason only, people from other career paths and backgrounds are more than willing to jump into this field.

The following statements cover this demand:

73% of data science and analytics teams planned to hire in Q1/Q2 of 2021 and 81% planned to hire in Q3/Q4 of 2021. Increased demand (and possibly steady or even reduced supply) has already translated into salary increases. — Forbes

For example Developers or Data Engineers can work their way into the field of Data Science as well. The advantage is that they already know the data and can prepare it very well. Often, cloud solutions even offer machine learning services that can easily be placed on the storages such as a Data Lake or Data Warehouse. But employees from the business can also be trained in this area. People with a degree in the areas of Finance or Controlling, can easily educate themselves with courses in the areas of statistics, Excel, Python and many others.

As a newcomer or career changer, however, you should be a little more flexible. For example, not everyone coming into this field can expect developing new data-driven services right away, but companies are relying more and more on the data and also need employees who can work in data analytics, data management or as the product managers in the field of data. These are too, interesting jobs that are related to the Data Scientist and through which you can work your way into this field.

In summary, the demand for people who work with data is very high and lateral entrants are also in demand. There are various opportunities for anybody to work in this field. However, flexibility is important.