IT career roadmap: How to become a data scientist

A data scientist is one of the most in-demand, high-profile careers in IT today, but Tom Walsh and Alex Krowitz have been working behind the scenes in the field for years. Walsh, a research engineer and Krowitz, a senior research engineer at cloud workforce management solutions company Kronos, sift through the influx of proprietary and customer data to identify patterns and gain insights based on that data. There are generally two kinds of projects we regularly handle; mining patterns within data to improve our own products is one and the other is taking on specific sets of customer data to gather and deliver insights from that," says Walsh. What companies are looking for is ultimately the capability to make predictions based on that data, says Krowitz. Companies use those predictions to help drive everything from marketing strategy to resource allocation, personnel levels and staffing, or to predict retail sales, he says. "We have products that use machine learning algorithms to help customers with these predictions.