eFinancialCareersIf you want to make sure you don't lose your job in finance (or anywhere else) in the next five years, you probably want to work in 'big data'. But what do big data jobs entail?
Speaking at last week's Women of Silicon Roundabout conference in London, Dr. Rebecca Pope, the head of data science and engineering at KPMG, said you don't need to be an excellent statistician or a high class mathematician to work in big data. Nor do you need a lot of prior programming knowledge.
However, you do need an interest in statistics, you do need to be willing to learn how to code, and you do need to know how to do some high level mathematical operations.
Pope herself didn't study pure statistics (she's a neuroscientist). Nor did she study programming. Instead, she learned how to program after graduating, and she attended "endless hackathons."
"I started learning R. But my advice would be that if you are launching a career in data science you should specialize in Python – make Python the first language you learn," said Pope.
