These specialists need to have a rare combination of great programming skills, strong statistical capability, intuitive visual designing and exceptional user experience skills
With enterprises looking at leveraging big data analytics tools to build a competitive edge, there has been a surge in the need for analytics specialists in the past. Within this domain, there is a subset of tech specialisation – data visualisers – which is emerging as a sought after hot profile by businesses.
“With data coming in from distributed sources and multiple enterprise apps, analysis of data is becoming more complex and the relevance of data visualisers is becoming more and more significant. The reason being, having huge volumes of relevant data is not enough. It needs to be converted into an easily consumable format for the business heads to analyse and deep dive,” said J Ramachandran, CEO, Gramener, a data visualization and analytics company.
The key function of a data visualization specialist is to represent the analysed data in an interactive visual format on an intuitive user interface providing a great user experience for business decision makers. Though this sounds very simple, the job profile is much more complex than what it seems.
Data visualization specialists need to be four-in-one
Ramachandran shared that a data visualization expert needs to be a rare combination of four core skill-sets.
- Great programming skills: The candidate must have great problem solving skills and should be an effective coder who can effortlessly design software
- Strong statistical capability: He/she should be able to crunch large chunks of data and be familiar with statistical and mathematical tools that can deconstruct huge data volumes which are in various formats
- Intuitive visual designing with a great sense of user experience: A data visualization specialist should have a great sense of visually representing data in a way that the brain can easily process it
- Deep understanding of customer needs: A data visualization expert would need to have a strong understanding about the visualization designs which best suits different industries and customer-cases. This is essential because every business case is different and the visualization and deep diving capabilities required from the data visualization platform varies accordingly
Job description of data visualization experts
Though the specific skill-sets a data visualization expert needs to have within a specific industry vertical differs on the basis of the industry’s specific needs, there are certain key areas of specializations which are being asked for, across all verticals. These are:
- Experience with basic visualization tools like Tableau, Qlikview, TiBCO, SpotFire, SAP Lumira, SAP XCelsius, Google Refine and Fusion Tables
- Sound knowledge of data warehouse and BI concepts
- Ability to architect BI and dashboard solutions
- Knowledge of advanced analytics and statistics model
- Excellent visualization skills and understanding of user experience needs to present insight in a simple and comprehensive manner
- Expertise in coding for creating interactive visualizations
- Someone who doesn’t get intimidated by huge data volume and can juggle with various analytics tools to process the huge amount of data
Demand to increase in the next few years
It is being observed that the requirement for data visualizers is quite strong within customer-data intensive verticals such as telecom which have to manage huge volumes of customer call data records; in regulation intensive verticals like BFSI which need to store and analyse financial data for compliance and regulatory purposes and customer-impact centric industries like retail, which depend very strongly on analytics tools to take quick business decisions based on the dynamic customer preferences.
With businesses understanding the potential of how big data can transform their business the role of big data analytics professionals, especially the data visualization specialists, is set to go up. This is a great trend for techies to tap into, because there is an increasing demand for such professionals, coupled with the fact that this combination is quite rare to find.
Currently in India, there are very few certifications available which can make a techie specialized in this area. Ramachandran shared that talent crunch is stark, when it comes to scouting the market for data visualization experts. Taking a cue from this, the tech academia should be aiming to constantly upgrade their course by gauging the emerging tech roles in demand within various industries. This would in turn equip the young techies with a better understanding of what the evolving businesses are set to demand from them.
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