Developing Analytic Talent: Becoming a Data Scientist

CHAPTER7

Launching Your New Data Science Career

Chapter 6 discussed case studies, real-life applications, and success stories covering various types of data science initiatives. This chapter focuses on helping you get employed as a data scientist, starting with 90 job interview questions (including questions on how to solve small, real-life data science problems), exercises to test your visual analytic skills, career moves from statistician to data scientist, examples of well-known data scientists and the skills they have, and finally, typical job titles (few are actually called data scientists, though this is changing) and salary surveys.

Job Interview Questions

These are mostly open-ended questions that prospective employers may ask to assess the technical horizontal knowledge of a senior candidate for a high-level position, such as a director, as well as of junior candidates. The answers to some of the key questions can be found at http://bit.ly/1cGlFA5.

Questions About Your Experience

• What is the biggest data set you have processed, and how did you process it? What were the results?
• Tell me two success stories about your analytic or computer science projects. How was lift (or success) measured?
• Have you been involved in database design and data modeling?
• Have you been involved in dashboard creation and metric selection? What do you think about BIRT?
• What features of Teradata do you like?
• How do you handle missing data? What imputation techniques do you recommend?
• Have you ...