China Gorman, HRExaminer Editorial Advisory Board Member
And that makes me think about their job descriptions and, specifically, the kinds of skills one needs to be a Data Scientist, the who in this discussion.
Thomas H. Davenport wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review, Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century . He describes the job of Data Scientist this way: “Data Scientists are the people who understand how to fish out answers to important business questions from today’s tsunami of unstructured information.” If today’s data is described as a tsunami, I’m not sure we have language to describe the amount and flow of data in 10 or 20 years. The people able to make sense of all that data for the benefit of the business and its customers will be the next generation of business rock stars. Sexy, indeed.
The Institute for the Future has published a list of the top 10 work skills for the organizations in the not-too-distant future. While all of the skills will be needed to some degree for organizational effectiveness, three of those ten relate directly to the need make connections among data sets for competitive advantage:
- Computational Thinking
- Transdisciplinarity
- Cognitive Load Management
Others, according to Davenport, include:
- Code writing
- Data hacking
- Analysis
- Communication
- Credibility (to be a trusted advisor to the C-suite)
Writing job descriptions for these positions will entail exquisite collaboration between an organization’s recruiting function and the hiring executive. Actually, determining to whom the Data Scientist will report will be the first organizational challenge. Where would you put them on the org chart? Marketing? IT? R&D? Product Development? Business Intelligence?
Since there aren’t any college degree programs for aspiring Data Scientists yet, validating the mastery of these skills will be an interesting challenge for recruiters and hiring managers. What are some sample behavioral interview questions that get to the heart of Transdisciplinarity and Cognitive Load Management? Do you really ask about the last time they hacked a secure system? What kind of challenge can you create to measure Computational Thinking? And do the attributes that would secure a spot as a trusted advisor to the C-suite even exist in a code writing, system hacker? Think Marty McFly with a Masters in Software Engineering and a Ph.D. in Philosophy…
The jobs of the future are coming. Data Scientist is just one of those jobs. In the rarefied environments of IBM, Oracle, SAP and Deloitte, recruiters are already searching for these skills and the Data Scientists are already hard at work. In normal work-a-day environments, we can’t spell Transdisciplinarity (even Word doesn’t know it’s a word) much less recruit for it.
We have a great deal to do to prepare for the future. And while Marty McFly’s original Back to the Future date is only 2 ½ years away (October 21, 2015), by then there will be degrees in data science available from leading universities. There will be professional associations for data scientists. There will be sample job descriptions on websites like Monster and SHRM. There will be recruiting conference tracks on how to find and recruit them. And the arguments about where they should report functionally will have subsided.
In other words, within a relatively short period of time, we’ll have this one figured out and we’ll be looking for the next new job requiring skills we’ve never heard of. Makes me wish I was a recruiter!
