Recently I was on a phone conversation with a friend, she was in her mid career stage and she was troubled about her career .She wanted to know what to do next , what aspect of data science she should focus on and what professional certifications would be relevant . A lot of us falls into this category and I believe this article would help you understand some fundamentals .Am going to shed more light on the various roles and responsibility available in the data science world and how you can plug your career in the right direction.

The truth is you are not alone, as a data scientist you are to work with the following categories of people

• Business analytics specialist You work with under the supervision of the business intelligence architect most time.If you are a trainee you are expect to have some basic skills of the following sql, database design and architecture, fundamentals of excel,pivot and programming.These are some of the tools you might be using daily.
• Business Intelligence Architect Most times this role is usually assigned to the most senior employee in the technical team because of the wealth of experience they have gathered over time in the industry. They build system architecture by maximizing the potential of a company’s data,they also link IT system throughout a company.
• The roles looks summarized but it entails a lot and it requires you have good skills of programming,project management,system design and statistics.
• Data Scientist They do research on big data sets,sometimes you have to work on hypothesis by looking for patterns and meaning from data.
• Machine Learning Specialist. Creativity and Independence cant be left out paying attention to details and quality is critical . A knowledge of mathematics,statistics, programming languages like python c++, java and R,Text mining .Being conversant with linux tools like awk,grep,find and sort and distributed computing
• Data Visualization Developer. Their skills can be used in any industry data is being used.They Identify the best means to express data ,some of the skills they might require include programming,database system, query language
• Data Engineer. You write code for data acquisition and persistence and also help in building a predictive algorithms.Sometimes your help with reporting and visualization is an advantage

To advance you skill in data science kindly have some skills in the following

• Excel
• Python
• R
• Hadoop Fundamental
• Data Visualization
• Data Mining
• Big Data Analytics

At whatever level you are in your career you can always take it a step further , you should remember you are not alone .There are a lot of certification bodies and training institute specifically tailored to help you get knowledge and skills..Keep digging and keep learning always.