Data Science Minimum: 10 Essential Skills You Need to Know to Start Doing Data Science

Benjamin Obi Tayo Ph.D.
Towards Data Science
7 min readNov 4, 2019

Authors: Benjamin O. Tayo and Gideon Takor

Benjamin O. Tayo LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-o-tayo-ph-d-a2717511/

Gideon Takor LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gideon-takor-mba-28835820/

Data Science is such a broad field that includes several subdivisions like data preparation and exploration; data representation and transformation; data visualization and presentation; predictive analytics; machine learning, etc. For beginners, it’s only natural to raise the following question: What skills do I need to become a data scientist?

This article will discuss 10 essential skills that are necessary for practicing data scientists. These skills could be grouped into 2 categories, namely, technological skills (Math & Statistics, Coding Skills, Data Wrangling & Preprocessing Skills, Data Visualization Skills, Machine Learning Skills,and Real World Project Skills) and soft skills (Communication Skills, Lifelong Learning Skills, Team Player Skills and Ethical Skills).

Data science is a field that is ever-evolving, however mastering the foundations of data science will provide you with the necessary background that you need to pursue advance concepts such as deep learning…

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Published in Towards Data Science

Your home for data science and AI. The world’s leading publication for data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence professionals.

Written by Benjamin Obi Tayo Ph.D.

Dr. Tayo is a data science educator, tutor, coach, mentor, and consultant. Contact me for more information about our services and pricing: benjaminobi@gmail.com

Responses (7)

What are your thoughts?

Hmm. One skill I would count also in is to have some knowledge of the business domain so you can utilize those 10 essential skills you mentioned.
I’ve had this in my mind that being data scientist requires at least three things. Data analysis, programming and tools, business domain knowledge. Anything else is extra.

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I have been following the rise of this Data Scientist job description and as it keeps accumulating more requirements I can tell it has reached levels that are practically impossible to squeeze into one individual person. What happened with the known…...

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All things said are true.. and start using BigML resolves a lot of fiddeling around with all indivudual tasks mentioned.
And start asking business questions and solve them with (Big)ML.
Get rid of coding... :-) start with the fun of solving real…...

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