Big Data skills

To get into the field of Big Data, lots of people especially IT professionals are wondering what kinds of skills are required.

Here are some skills you should have or plan to have:

• Hadoop (a good tutorial site from Yahoo)
• Data mining and machine learning techniques (a book on Amazon)
• Data visualization tools (i.e. Tableau software)
• Data warehousing (i.e. IBM Big Data and Warehousing)
• ETL (extract, translate, load, i.e. Talend Open Studio) 
• Predictive modeling (an example on Pinterest)
• Statistical modeling with tools (i.e. R, SAS, or SPSS)
• Structured and unstructured databases (i.e. Oracle)

It will take time to learn and explore. But all the above skills will help you build your Big Data career path such as Data Scientist.

Here are some articles for your reference:

Big data skills: Should data scientist be your next job? 

"Big data analytics is sometimes sold as a boon for IT workers, with analyst house Gartner predicting that within three years there will be 4.4 million staff working on big data projects. "

Big data worker shortage demands job candidates with diverse backgrounds

"The U.S. faces a substantial shortage of workers with data science skills, according to a much-talked about report published last year by consulting firm McKinsey and Company. The report predicted that by 2018 the country will lack 1.5 million analysts who can make strategic decisions using big data and between 140,000 to 190,000 workers with the proper data-processing technology skills."

Big Data is Hot. Now What?

"Regardless if they are called Data Scientists or Data Analysts, Data geeks need to be more in control of their destiny. "