I got an interesting career question related to data scientists today, and I thought of sharing with the LinkedIn community and seek some feedback too.
“What is the ONE single skill that the data scientist should focus on honing?”
I’m glad people ask me tough question that will make me think more about data science as a career. For me, the single most important skill I will FOCUS on and IMPROVE upon is actually “Learning”. We are in a Knowledge Economy where lifelong learning is going to be important, especially algorithms, and tools keeps being updated or replaced, we need to learn EFFICIENTLY.
I have a few learning tips on top of the answer and here they are:
1) Know how to Google (or stick to one search engine)
Think about the search term carefully, so that you can look for what you want. With a more targeted search term and training #Google search engine with the ‘right’ clicks, Google (or can be DuckDuckGo as well) will be “trained” to provide what you are looking, turning it into a virtuous cycle.
2) Understand the assumptions behind the lessons.
Everyone has limited time, so being able to read between the lines, understand what are the assumptions made by the instructor, blog writer, StackOverflow contributor can help a lot in your understanding. For instance, why the blog writer propose a tool in this circumstances instead of another tool that you are familiar with. Critical Thinking helps!
3) Learn to Unlearn
After learning the assumptions, you can then understand when its time to give up on certain tools or concept or best practices and move on to other tools or algorithms instead. Through this we can keep ourselves updated and also keep our capacity of knowledge and skills to the latest.
These are some tips I followed. I hope it is useful to you. If you have any learning tips, please feel free to share them in the comments. If you find this post useful, consider sharing it. :)
What are your thoughts? Will love to hear them!
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