Learning how to be a professional data scientist is different now, but it’s not impossible Today’s column is partly about data science, but it’s also about the sociology of work. As a senior practitioner in the field, I started my data science career long before Covid-19 and the radical shift in the way we work today developed. I started my professional career years before even that. As a result, my years of learning how to be a professional anything, let alone a professional data scientist, were spent in close quarters with much more experienced people, and in many ways that made it possible for me to get where I am.

Data science roles can be very different, and job postings are not always clear. What hat do you want to wear? After the positive responses to my recent post in Towards Data Science about Machine Learning Engineers , I thought I would write a bit about what I think are the real categories of roles for data science practitioners in the job market. While I was previously talking about the candidates, e.