Data Analytics and Data Science are two very different career paths.

A data scientist is going to be working on building and training models that do forecasting, prediction, machine learning. This field changes really quickly and data scientists have to stay on top of new methods and tools, LLM’s like ChatGPT are what is really hot right now and companies are definitely willing to pay well for people that can do this stuff. I think it’s a little harder to get a role doing this as smaller companies aren’t really setup to do this type of work, junior pay is probably 80-120k annually. Really high ceiling on pay depending on how good you are. Most work would be done in Python but you’d probably need to know SQL and a few other things here and there. This will most likely require a CS degree or an adjacent masters to find a job in todays market.

Data Analytics is going to be more traditional data work, reporting KPIs, statistical analysis, etc. People get into this with all kinds of backgrounds, all tech companies and a ton of non tech companies have roles like this. The career path is definitely broader, you can just be a great analyst up to being a principal analyst, or you can move into a more technical role. I think a lot of analysts move into Database Admin, Data Engineering, Analytics engineering etc. Amazon and Snowflake have changed a lot how companies work with data so this type of role will definitely continue to grow. The vast majority of work will be done in SQL with maybe some Python, and will use tools like Tableau, Domo, Looker for visualizations and reports. Starting salaries for this are probably anywhere from 40-80k depending on how good you are and what you know, size of company etc. Typically people have degrees in Math, Stats, Econ but it isn’t really a requirement.


CS is definitely still a very good field, I would just steer you away a front end web developer skill set as it’s a really saturated market. Full stack engineers are not going anywhere anytime soon, the more backend of a skill set a developer has coming out of school the more valuable they will be to a company right away.