In brief
The data industry is a highly competitive yet rewarding field. In order to succeed in your conquest, you should master 3 key skills that are: Coding, marketing and awareness. This post is about the 3 Ultimate skillsets in the Data Industry that you should master !
Introduction
Let’s uncover The 3 Ultimate skillsets in the Data Industry that you should master.This can upscale drastically any data professional career !
Coding
Coding obviously is the very first game changer for a data professional !
Now coding is a vast field. A data professional can make the choice to specialize in one or several coding languages. He can also choose to be a full stack developer.
What does it mean in a more practical way ?
Coding for data professionals encompasses 3 main groups
Data science
The pure knowledge aiming at manipulating data and extract as much value as possible out of it. This includes data wrangling or preprocessing, machine and deep learning as well as data visualization. For this purpose, the main used languages and tools are Python and R for general data manipulation and machine learning. TensorFlow and Keras for machine and deep learning and D3.JS for data visualization. Classical softwares like Excel should also be kept in mind since they can be used in developer mode. For example by using Visual Basic for instance. And can be very powerful in addition to the fact that it’s already hugely popular and requested.
Full stack development
The second group of coding skills for data professionals is full stack development for Web, Mobile and Desktop applications. This can be subdivided into front-end development using HTML, CSS and Javascript (JS). Or more recent solutions and frameworks like Ionic and React. Apache Cordova or Adobe PhoneGap is also a great solution for data professionals. This is because it’s a cross platform mobile development framework using the basic front-end development technologies stated above. In addition to back-end development using for instance Python and its great frameworks Django or Flask for Web development.
IT and DB admin
The 3rd group of coding skills for data professionals is IT & DB Administration. This 3rd bucket contains the classical DB languages and technologies based on SQL and the more recent ones based on noSql solutions. It also contains tools on how to create and process big data like Spark, MapReduce, Kafka to name a few. In addition to data and cyber security based on cryptography, safe coding and counter hacking solutions. It contains also cloud solutions like the great AWS that encompasses all what is mentioned in this bucket and even more.
Consequently coding can be considered as the very first game changer for a data professional. Generally, if your target is to have an expertise then you can choose one bucket of the above or even one single activity from it and target to be at the top 1 to 5% best in the world. This is already a great plan for a highly successful career !
If on the other hand you are more targeting an entrepreneurship career, then it’s important to know the ins and outs of the major buckets and solutions without necessarily being a guru of each because it’s anyway nearly impossible to do so.
That was about the first game changer !
Marketing
Time to move to the second big game changer for a Data Professional and introducing Marketing and more specifically Digital Marketing !
Like coding, Digital marketing is a vast and fascinating field.
Like each big field, it can be subdivided into more granular component and sub specialties like:
S-Suite
Social Media Marketing SMM, Search Engine Marketing SEM, Search Engine Optimization SEO: it consists in using the targeted and highly qualified traffic on web and mobile applications in order to promote products and services through advertising
e-Mail marketing
One of the oldest Digital Marketing Techniques but surprisingly the most efficient digital marketing technique when used correctly
Content Marketing
Includes all supports that can encompass interesting content for a given audience like: blog articles, yt and fb videos, instagram stories and pictures etc: It aims at catching targeted audience by providing interesting information for them.
Copyrighting
A fascinating discipline consisting in selling through writing. It’s a subtle mixture between literature, story telling, psychology and persuasion. Personally, I love copywriting and I forget the time when I start reading about it ! Mastering it is simply like gaining a super power that can change radically your life for the much better at both personal and professional levels ! If you have the opportunity to invest some time to discover it, just do it !
Affiliate Marketing
It’s based on a principle that exists since the very first ages of human being: it simply consists in being the intermediate between a product owner and the final buyer and taking a commission for bringing the leads and triggering the sales. Think about all the digital products and especially data products that exist on the web and that are eligible for an affiliate program: Think about Data science and coding courses and softwares, the same for IT and data management ones. One can easily see how the opportunity is huge and how the model is interesting: You can start selling products immediately and getting paid for it without having to produce them. In addition, commissions for Digital Products range generally between 20 and more than 70% in some cases which makes affiliate marketing a great opportunity that should be considered very seriously by data professionals
Growth hacking
It can be presented as the field of leveraging data based business intelligence and web virality in order to generate exponential business growth at minimum or even nol costs. For example finding the good formula for viral promoting videos of a business that explodes the new brand awareness for no or very little costs is a typical growth hacking trick. Growth hacking is based mainly on data analysis and the pure creativity of its practitioner. It’s also a very fascinating and interesting field of Digital Marketing !
Awareness
After those 2 big game changers among The 3 Ultimate skillsets in the Data Industry that you should master, what about the 3rd one ?
This is where the 3rd game changer comes into play: it’s Awareness: so wat is exactly meant by awareness?
Indeed, data business is moving at a very high pace and a smart data professional should always keep his eyes wide open on what’s happening in this highly rich ecosystem.
For this purpose, a data professional should keep an eye on 2 main topics:
New technologies
Since technology solutions and tools is a vital toolset for a data professional, it’s very important to be aware of what’s going on and what are the last solutions that are making the hype. New solutions aim often at increasing efficiency and reducing costs, hence ignoring them can cause a dangerous lag w.r.t. direct competitors and can be very harmful to you as data professional. Let’s take the example of AWS that are releasing new tremendous services each month that make scaling businesses accessible to anyone mastering those new technologies.
New trends
A data professional should be aware of the last trends and the next big events. Indeed, what makes us loving what we are doing as data professional is that what we have as data skills make us operational and capable of bringing great value to any business and any challenge in the world. Hence, being aware of the next opportunity is definitely a great competitive advantage for each data professional and a highly powerful game changer !
To conclude
Hence we can summarize the main 3 game changers for a data professional to : Coding, marketing and awareness.
It’s very rare to be savvy and operational in all those 3 game changers at the same time as a data professional but it’s possible with some patience and an efficient training strategy.
No data professional is obliged to know and master all of those 3 game changers but the more one knows about them, the closer he will be from a highly successful data professional career !
There are also data professionals that choose to build expertise on just one of these fields and it’s fair enough for building a successful data professional career too as long as the field of focus is demanded and that the data professional builds a clear competitive advantage around it.
