Big data is bigger than ever and that makes it a point of attraction for everyone who has remotely heard of it from somewhere.
A recent curiosity going on in the professional world these days is that what is it exactly that a big data professional does?
And, the reason why this thought is coming up in the minds of people is that there are a variety of quantitative roles in the market, but, it is difficult to differentiate them from big data roles.
It is quite natural to be confused about this as professionals performing at both of these positions work with data, however, they are different in terms of the capacity in which they deal with it. So, this article is going to throw some light on the kind of work that big data professionals undertake and how is that any different from the activities carried out by quantitative professionals.
Analytics professionals
These people are trained professionals for applying revolutionary quantitative skills to actions and interactions involved in data transcribing in order to extract insights and present ways to enact accordingly.
Big data professionals
Professionals in the big data related stream of work are highly qualified individuals who can make sense out of giant sets of data and possess the expertise to derive value out of incredibly problematic data that is difficult to be dealt with conventional tools.
There is a subgroup of big data professionals that are referred to as data scientists which I assume that you must have heard of as it was mentioned as the ‘sexiest job of the 21st century’ in the Harvard Business Review. Individuals working as data scientists study for years to gain the authority and prowess to handle raw, unstructured data flooding from multiple sources like social media, video & audio files.
If you are still in some sort of complexity, there are a range of other factors that define big data professionals and set them apart from other professionals from the realm of analytics.
The Characteristics of Certified big data professionals
Educational Background:
As far as the education part is concerned in the case of big data professionals, they all possess degrees that concentrate on quantitative skills like applied mathematics, statistics, operations research, or else economics. As a matter of fact, eighty-six percent of professionals dealing with big data have a master’s degree and twenty percent of those even hold Ph.Ds. Moreover, if I talk about the educational expertise of data scientists, around forty-six percent of them own Ph.Ds.
Knowledge of tools:
Certified big data professionals are proficient in using one or more contemporary tools as well as methodologies of analytics, for example, data mining, advanced coding, modeling along with programming in R, Hadoop, SAS & SQL.
Ability to work upon gigantic datasets:
The size of datasets that these professionals base their work on are usually measured in terabytes or gigabytes. For example, there are a plethora of automobile companies that gather sensor data through thousands and thousands of automobiles in order to anticipate machine failure as well as plan how to go about their preventative maintenance.
The Scope of Big Data as a Profession:
Companies today are well aware that they got to keep their consumers content in order to attract success. And, this road to success can only be hopped upon with a wise use of the ever-growing data generated by customers on an everyday basis.
And, Big data professionals are the masterminds who extract business value out of unprocessed data. So there is a wide scope of success for individuals wanting to enter this profession.
