As a talented data science consultant, you are welcome everywhere

The expertise of the data science consultant will be needed everywhere in the coming years. It is a broad field with wonderful challenges for ICT specialists who are strong in things like statistics and data analysis. Want to know more? Then read on quickly!

The expertise of the data science consultant is needed everywhere in the coming years. Within projects of leading online companies to understand visitor behavior. But also in healthcare to determine health risks or predict possible side effects of medication. It is a broad field with wonderful challenges for ICT specialists who are strong in things like statistics and data analysis. And techniques like data mining, cluster analysis or machine learning. Including the ability to understand, within a given industry, what information is really needed and be able to explain that to management.

Data science consultant makes headlines

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg was visiting the European Parliament. He had to answer for the biggest privacy breach in Facebook's history. In the run-up to the U.S. presidential election, the company Cambridge Analytica was found to have collected huge amounts of data from Facebook users. It started with 270,000 users having them fill out a personality test, but the result was that they were able to get the likes, status updates and even full conversations of all their friends. That data was used to build a huge database of some 80 million potential voters who were targeted with highly targeted messages. Cambridge Analytica also appears to have influenced voters in this way during the Brexit election. The company is now defunct. It remains unclear to what extent it is responsible for an unexpected U.S. president and the painful departure of the British.

It is not the way a serious data science consultant wants to be in the news. It does, however, mark the enormous potential of this specialty. Huge amounts of data are produced worldwide every second. Partly consciously when we post a video on YouTube, for example. But much more often unconsciously. Because almost every action of people, vehicles, devices and even animals is almost automatically recorded in one way or another. By our cell phone, by all kinds of sensors or by the registration chip in our cat. The challenge for data science consultants is to find the nuggets of gold in that enormous mountain of data.

Examples of great data science assignments

Because fortunately, Cambridge Analytica is a negative exception within a wonderful field. Especially in the data science field, we are actually only at the beginning of what is possible. The analysis of so-called unstructured data still poses enormous challenges, but at the same time promises the most beautiful results. We are very advanced in the analysis of databases with numbers and other structured data, but in the analysis and processing of images, texts and other unstructured data there is still a lot to develop.

Data science, from commercial to social applications

With data science we can optimize business processes, find potential customers, predict economic trends or recognize fraud. The personal suggestions you get in a web store involve data science consultants in the background to make those recommendations as personal and effective as possible. But police also use data science to best predict future crime patterns based on current crime statistics and other information. Not, à la Tom Cruise in Minority Report, to arrive on the crime scene before the crime occurs. But to use limited resources in the most targeted way possible to prevent and solve crimes. And the Heart Foundation, for example, is investing in research into omens and vague symptoms that may indicate heart problems at an early stage.

Innovative assignments for you as a data science consultant?

A fascinating field in which you can go in any direction as a data science consultant, from purely commercial to socially involved. Would you like to take a new step in your career as a data science consultant? HeadFirst would like to help you with that. Sign up and start looking for current data science or data analytics assignments.