Regular LinkedIn users who often check the classified job ads may have noticed an increasingly common trend among marketing recruiters – jobs requiring some expertise in data science (or “Big Data scientists”). Big Data and digitally applied skills jointly provide better analysis of business/ consumer results (or any shortfalls in this area); and, such skills also help to extrapolate and zone in on those who are likely to be interested in the client’s products and service offering. Several tech magazines have identified this type of job role as being “better paying than medicine” as a career path, with a future focus in app creation to look for pattern-seeking and data crunching knowledge: “This trend for data scientists mimics the trend for digital specialists that happened earlier at the turn of the millennium.” (Wired US).
Further Understanding of Big Data Science
Big data refers to data sets that are so vast or complicated that standard data processing apps or
software is unable to deal with them. Data sets expand rapidly, partly because they are nowadays bombarded by numerous information-gathering mobile devices, aerial or remote data sensing and storage, mobile software logs (which work across apps and platforms for most of the time, resulting in lots of data in different formats), plus of course image and sound uploads from the device, RFID and POS reader data and Wi-Fi network pings – such is the nature of our always-on world. Progressing from earlier data mining specialists, there is now such a wealth of information that the capture, filing, processing, analysis and reporting is a science unto itself, hence the growing number of graduates choosing to specialize in the field.
Making the data organized, easy to read and relevant to the business mission at hand is done through applying statistical tools. This is how the data is eventually processed into a form usable by senior management for the purposes of decision-making. For marketers, this typically means outsourcing, although the industry is still in its relevant infancy in Thailand. For mere mortals who aren’t raised as hardcore tech-geeks, at least having an understanding of its value is something to bear in mind when designing any sort of marketing plan. Old school students of international business at college or uni will be familiar with the need to conduct market research as an early step in preparing a business plan. What has changed now is that data has gone from megabytes to terabytes, and the skill set needed to harvest its value has become exponentially more specialized.
