Upskill

Bringing data to your career development

What is the most important technical skill for a Data Sciences professional? Great question; difficult answer. The answer depends on what you mean by Data Sciences (Data Analyst, Data Engineer, Data Scientist). Also, there are a few zillion tools and techniques people are using in the name of Data Sciences. Which ones are most important?

I did an analysis of over 6,000 open positions for Data Analysts, Data Engineers, and Data Scientists across the United States to bring data to this valuable question (and others like it).

So what does the data have to say about the most important technical skill? For Data Engineers and Data Scientists? Python. For Data Analysts? SQL

Other interesting questions:

If I want to become a Data Analyst, what technical skills should I know? SQL and Excel are most popular

I’m pretty good with SQL and Excel, what should I learn next? Tableau, Python, PowerBI, and R

How does R stack up against Python? For Data Scientists, 78% of jobs referenced Python compared to 52% for R. For Data Analysts: 31% vs 21%. And for Data Engineers: 66% vs 13%

Who is leading the way in Cloud Platforms? For all three job categories, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is most popular, followed by Azure, and then Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Who is winning the battle between Snowflake and Databricks? For Data Engineers, Snowflake has a slight edge with 15% vs 11% of open positions 

What about techniques - what should I know? For Data Engineers and Data Scientists, Machine Learning and AI are top of the list. For Data Analysts, Reporting, Dashboards, and Data Visualization

Does anyone care about data quality? Yes. 26% of Data Analyst positions reference Data Quality. Alas, only 16% of Data Engineer jobs do

And my favorite, for Data Analyst positions, 12% reference ad hoc work. Does that mean the other 88% focus only on carefully planned work?

The analysis answers these questions and more. I hope you find it as interesting as I did.

Aaron