Polytechnics offer courses to meet growing demand for data scientists

Companies are increasingly collecting data in greater volumes to study patterns in consumer behaviour. Even the German football team, en route to winning last year's World Cup, analysed massive amounts of data on its own players and rival players, to gain an edge.

To meet the rising demand for data scientists, Temasek Polytechnic (TP) is introducing a diploma course in big data management and governance, the only such full-time course at a poly here. It will also offer a part-time specialist diploma course in big data management. Last October, Nanyang Polytechnic introduced a part-time specialist diploma in business and big data analytics.

TP course manager Serena Tai said: "More companies are leveraging big data to gain insight and make better business decisions. Finding professionals with the right data management skills is difficult. We need more trained professionals in this area."

In April, TP will take in 50 students each for its full-time and part-time courses.

Full-time students will learn to extract information and analyse vast amounts of data in the first two years. In the final year, they will do projects and internships with companies.

Upon graduation, they can work as data engineers, data visualisation specialists and database administrators.

Last month, TP, with tech firms Pivotal Software and EMC Computer Systems, launched the TP-Pivotal Data Science Academy to provide short certification courses.

Mr Greg Whalen, chief data scientist at Pivotal Asia-Pacific and Japan, said: "Businesses have to collect more data and they will require people to analyse these data."

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