5 Steps from Business Analyst to Data Scientist

In the past, the terms business analyst and data scientist have sometimes been used interchangeably, and indeed, in a small company, the lines between the two sorts of jobs may blur. But as more and more companies look to big data for business insights, they are shifting from relying on business analysts to predict what the future of a business might look like, and moving towards using data scientists and machine learning to interpret data and predict trends. What's the difference, you might ask? While the end result of these two jobs is often similar, a business analyst and a data scientist use different tools to get there. In general, data scientists have much greater technical expertise, especially in computer programming, systems engineering, and statistics.