Data Science (and Analytics) Certification
Much like the definition of big data, the job description for data scientist is definitely a work in progress. What skills are required? Well, in addition to possessing a strong math and computer science background, including the ability to devise algorithmic solutions to complex problems, data scientists need to be good communicators -- people capable of grasping business issues and explaining data-driven insights to executives and managers.
Fair enough. But how does an organization know that the data scientist it's just hired has all of these skills? The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), a 10,000-member international organization of analytics professionals, believes its recently launched Certified Analytics Professional (CAP) program provides the rigorous certification needed in the burgeoning big data field.
"We realized that there were a lot of people putting themselves out there as analytics practitioners, but no real defining body on what that meant," INFORMS president Anne Robinson told InformationWeek in a phone interview.
