How to hire the Executive Data Scientist(CDS) and Scale Data Science Across the Enterprise.

In the age of data engineering and data science, many firms are trying to hire their Chief Data Scientist or Chief Analytics Officier but continue to struggle with how much engineering and science skills those leaders need versus leadership skills.

In my consulting and coaching practice, I am hearing some general themes in terms of challenges which demonstrate somewhat jumpy thinking in terms of what are the essential skills of the Chief Data Scientist:  Some skills you can teach and others come from deep experience.

Firstly, decide if you are looking to hire an executive leading data science or an individual contributor python expert. These are very different skills, and there are no Chimeras? Has anyone seen a Unicorn recently? I don’t think so. I subscribe to the complimentary and pod building theory of hiring which says the Chief Data Scientists needs to be surrounded by a variety of team members, not the least of which is the data engineer to ensure proper deployment of the ML solutions and to ensure IT resources are dedicated to projects.  Also, one question which may help you in hiring is asking yourself and knowing what are the connected skills to data science. Before DS was Predictive Analytics(PA) before PA was quantitative analysis(which skill sets are new and which ones are overlapped would be a good heat map or visual/infographic to create). More on this later. Continue reading “LOVE Data, LOVE Data Science, LOVE ML, LOVE AI, LOVE Azure, LOVE Tenzureflow and still LOVE YOUR BUSINESS MORE….”