What are the fundamental soft skills you need to succeed in data science?
- by 7wData
- October 22, 2018

data science is more than just a summation of hard skills. You need certain soft skills if you want to progress, writes data scientist Vin Vashishta.
What are soft skills? ‘Soft skills’ is one of those terms that is often used but rarely understood. Soft skills are skills with subjective measures of competence. Are they really necessary? Yes. If you want your career to move beyond the intermediate stage, soft skills are a must.
data science is more than just a summation of skills. There are externalities that impact both the inputs and outputs of data science. Without soft skills you can produce data science, but it has limited value to the business.
Many career advice pieces talk around soft skills without any explanation beyond a term and how you use it. What are communication skills? What is business acumen? And what other soft skills do you need?
There are three main components of communication skills. The first is message creation. How well can you summarize the information you need to communicate into a few high-level points? What are your primary communication objectives for any given interaction?
Most people talk but don’t communicate because they don’t start the conversation, email, or presentation with any communication objectives. Without objectives, you don’t really have a chance of being successful.


