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Soft Skills for Data Science

To be a great data scientist, foster these five skills

Rebecca Vickery
7 min readDec 7, 2019

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If you Google how to become a data scientist you will find a wealth of information listing the many technical skills that you need to develop. Whilst these are extremely important, if you really want to succeed as a data scientist you will need to also ensure that you have the right set of soft skills too.

These skills are not taught, nor are they listed, on most data science courses. Data science, although a highly paid and very rewarding role, is also probably one of the most challenging. Particularly against the current backdrop of AI hype in business. In order to navigate the particular challenges you may face as a data scientist you will need to foster excellent communication skills, resilience and grit, creativity and business acumen to succeed.

In this article, I will cover the five most important non-technical skills for data scientists, why they are important and how to master them. You will learn:

  • How to develop a healthy dose of skepticism in order to build truly useful data products.
  • Why grit and passion are essential to succeeding as a data scientist.
  • To implement the open and closed model of working to foster creativity.

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Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

Your home for data science and AI. The world’s leading publication for data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence professionals.

Rebecca Vickery
Rebecca Vickery

Written by Rebecca Vickery

Data Scientist | Writer | Speaker

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