Formal Education Attained and Nontraditional Education Pursued by Data Scientists

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A recent study found that about 2/3rds of data professionals hold either a Master’s (46%) or Doctoral (17%) degree and about a quarter of them hold a Bachelor’s degree. Additionally, the top platforms used by data professionals for data science courses are: Coursera (44%), Kaggle (25%) and Udemy (24%). 

Kaggle conducted a worldwide survey in October 2019 of 19,717 data professionals (2019 Kaggle Machine Learning and Data Science Survey). Their survey included a variety of questions about data science, machine learning, education and more. In this week’s post, I looked at the formal education attained and nontraditional education platforms used by data professionals.

Highest Formal Education Attained

Figure 1. Highest level of education attained. Click image to enlarge.

Respondents were asked to indicate the highest level of education they attained. The results of the survey reveal that data professionals, both women and men, are highly educated. Ninety percent of respondents said that they have, at least, a Bachelor’s degree. Specifically, about a 2/3rds of the respondents indicated that they have either a Master’s degree (46%) or Doctoral degree (17%). Twenty-seven percent of respondents hold a Bachelor’s degree.

Only a small fraction of the respondents indicated they have a professional degree (4%), some college/university study without earning a bachelor’s degree (3%), no formal education past high school (1%) or preferred not to answer (2%).

In this sample of respondents, more women have Doctoral degrees (19%) and Master’s degrees (48%) compared to their male counterparts (16% and 46%, respectively). More men, however, reported possessing Bachelor’s degrees (28%) compared to women (24%).

Nontraditional Education Platformed Used

Figure 2. Nontraditional education platforms used to learn about data science. Click image to enlarge.

While data professionals have a variety of ways of acquiring knowledge about fields of data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, a popular way is to employ different platforms. The survey included a question, “On which platforms have you begun or completed data science courses?” The top nine platforms used by data professionals are:

1. Coursera (44%)
2. Kaggle (25%, note that Kaggle conducted this study)
3. Udemy (24%)
4. University (21%)
5. DataCamp (20%)
6. edX (17%)
7. Udacity (16%)
8. Fastai (15%)
9. LinkedIn Learning (7%)

Looking at the entire sample of respondents, data professionals use two (2) platforms to learn about data science. However, when looking at gender differences, women use fewer of these platforms (median = 1) compared to men (median = 2). Of the respondents who selected “Other” as their response, the most frequently mentioned platforms included: YouTube, Cognitive Class, Stepik, Simplilearn, Pluralsight, NPTEL, MLCourse.ai, Data Science Academy, Codeacademy and Applied AI Course.

Summary

Data professionals are highly educated. Well over half of them have, at least a Master’s degree. Women and men in the field of data science do not differ with respect to their formal educational background (see Figure 1). For both genders, a majority of each held advanced degrees (i.e., Master’s – ~46%; PhD ~17%). Looking at nontraditional platforms used for data science courses, the most popular ones used by data professionals include Coursera, Kaggle, Udemy, University and DataCamp.