Corporate World Challenges for a Data Scientist Professional

Everyone is busy counting the promising prospects the data science industry presents. But it’s not as simple as that. There are a lot of problems too that this new job avenue presents.

Often companies place big bets on the data scientist and the people who become data scientists to have big expectations from the companies they start working with. They want a different kind of challenging stuff to work on to keep them motivated which is not the case in most scenarios.

Even if you hire and they start working with you, if you don’t have enough data to exploit, the data scientist professional you hire would get bored of no motivation to keep him/her with you resulting in a poor retention rate. The boredom is the result of incomplete values, poor representation of samples, and missing samples.

Let’s have a look at these issues in detail:

Not a hype and yet a hype- It is cited as one of the top paying jobs in the market. But not everything is pleasant in this industry. Various studies have pointed to a total of 13.2% individuals with top certifications are looking for fresh jobs. According to a report by The Financial Times, a data scientist professional is the second most unsatisfied individual in the context of job satisfaction. The reason seems to be hugely placed expectations on the shoulders of the data scientists.

Dilemmas faced by a certified data scientist- Often companies, every one of them, want to jump on the bandwagon. Why? Because nobody wants to miss the bus. But certainly, without being ready for the consequences of data or availability of mature data, it’s no point investing and hiring a certified data scientist.

To avoid this, first, start with compilation and data preparation so that you have enough inventory to mine and draw a conclusion. Another facet of this could be hiring a junior data professional. Companies hire them because of the less salary they have to pay them, but without any senior data scientist to guide them, the junior data professionals feel lost.

The corporate world and data scientist- Right relationship with the management is one important detail for a data science professional. Because a certified data scientist is involved in directly impacting the revenue of a company, any sort of politics and bad relationship can hamper their growth and simultaneously, the company’s growth. For great relationships, they are often on good terms with a lot of people which culminates in all sorts of data queries reaching out to them even if they may be mere Excel sheet calculations. But that’s not what a data scientist is hired for at the first place.

Moreover, the CXOs and the upper management is seriously not interested in seeing boring data and the data professional is supposed to collect all raw data, mine it, churn it, and make it more useful and interesting for business bottom lines. That’s when the management seems interested. It becomes a wild goose chase, especially, in organizations which are new to this whole scenario of data collection and mining. Then, a data professional has to face skeptics in such kinds of organizations who don’t like to part with information and data very easily.

All said and done, every job has some sort of challenges. But that mustn’t stop anyone from pursuing the kind of work they would like to work on or the kind of company they would like to work with. Since a lot of facts regarding the data science profession is a tad exaggerated, finding your true calling may take a while but certainly will happen.