Skills assessment firm Aspiring Minds has developed and introduced a solution to evaluate the skill sets of data scientists and data engineers, according to co-founder and CTO Varun Aggarwal.

“Data science is becoming important in determining business success. But there aren’t enough tools to test data scientists. A good data scientist needs to be proficient in computer programming, applied statistics and database management skills,” he said.

Unfortunately, in the country’s undergraduate courses, those studying statistics don’t learn computer programming and vice-versa, Aggarwal said. India is also seeing many takers for data science courses on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) platforms such as Coursera and edX, he added.

To company’s research team spent little more than a year to create the simulated assessment for data science skills. “We have spent close to $200,000 on building this assessment tool,” he told BusinessLine .

The tool provides a simulated environment for real-world data challenges to candidates, who need to write programs to crunch, analyse data and build predictive models.

Asked which sectors will find this tool most useful, he said: “While most industries these days employ data scientists, I believe IT will be an early adopter followed by IT-enabled services.”

Aspiring Minds is targeting companies in China, the Philippines and the US, apart from India, for this tool.

The assessment will evaluate the awareness of data science and machine leaning concepts. The machine learning module will test the skills of a data engineer which are typical in a machine learning workflow like munging and cleaning data, building predictive models and tabulating results.

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