Gone are the days when an MBA degree was your ticket to the corporate world.
Basic knowledge of marketing, HR, finance, macro and micro economic models, logistics and supply chain management, analysing a simple data set and reading case studies did guarantee you a job earlier! The ability to present this limited data set in the form of attractive power point presentations mostly acted as the “cherry on the cake”.
So what has changed in the present scenario? Nothing and everything! We are in an era where data is the new oil of digital economy.
Today’s world requires deep domain expertise integrated with soft skills.
The digital era, with an overflow of data, requires a professional who can collect and organise the data in a meaningful structure, analyse it through smart algorithms and arrive at a business/ social solution. Recently, at the launch of the Manipal Global Academy of data science, a senior colleague from an insurance multinational talked about how they are piloting an algorithm to not only reduce the time to settle vehicle accident claims for customers but also costs and human error significantly by shortening the claim-survey cycle.
All that they did was mine their images repository and presto all new images could be analysed without the need for a surveyor. The end result: delighted customers, quicker settlement time and substantial amount of cost saving for the company. This is the power of data science! So what is data science? It is the science of transforming data for decision making.
