How I switched from Data Analyst to Data Scientist

Welcome back! Something I see talked about in a lot of different forums is the transition from Data Analyst to Data Scientist. To be honest, there isn’t a blueprint to follow, no secrets, it’s literally just what you know and how you use it (obviously). With that being said, let me explain some things I would highly recommend you to focus on if you’re planning on transitioning.

Learning R and Python

This is by far the changing factor from going from a data analyst to data scientist, learning R and Python. If you go search for Data Science jobs in any career website you will probably see one of these languages being a requirement, this is by far the most important thing in the beginning to work on. Almost every single Data Scientist job I applied to required these, but in the beginning of my application process I only knew R, so I had to pretty much teach myself Python, although I wasn’t that great in the beginning, I was able to leverage my R experience to help me get that first job. If you don’t know any programming language right now, I would highly suggest learning Python, then learning R, then learning the other things I talk about in this article. Like I mentioned, I just looked at all of the Data Science positions available, looked at the job description, and learned what they required.