Is Data Science Suited to Self-Motivated Learning?

From datajobs:

"As a matter of fact, data science is such a relatively new and rising discipline that universities have not caught up in developing comprehensive data science degree programs – meaning that no one can really claim to have "done all the schooling" to be become a data scientist. Where does much of the training come from? The unyielding intellectual curiosity that data scientists possess drive them to be passionate autodidacts, motivated to learn skills on their own with deep determination"

Sometime this week, I realized that on sites like Quora, a lot of motivated, self-taught data scientists were unsure of their job prospects given that on one hand, job titles like "data analyst" tend to be in traditional firms, while on the other hand "data science" touts itself as a hot new profession in the post-MOOCs era. I decided that the only way to answer the question would be to go and do the survey myself. I've been connecting with the data science community on Twitter for some time now and figured it would be a good place to deploy the survey.

As an aside, I find it hard to think of MOOCs qua technological advancement as the catalyst for the self-taught data science. Rather, there is an entire social structure that allows the MOOC to make an impact. It's absolutely crucial for those opting for self-education to establish themselves in their field of interest via innovative means. See my upcoming post "A Guide for the Perplexed Pt.1" for more on that.

So I decided that SurveyMonkey would be the easiest way to handle it. I didn't give it much thought because the entire network of people and information that I'm building here requires swift action to keep up with the trends. I'm not waiting for someone else to solve my problem, right?

So here's the survey over at SurveyMonkey.

Things are still a bit slow but I just have to keep sharing it with people and hope we get some decent responses. While I'm waiting for responses, it's a good time to figure out which problems I'll run into in analyzing and interpreting the data. It's quicker to have the problems and solve them than to go through the process of learning survey design from scratch. That's certainly within my plans but I'd like to have some prior experience before investing time into studying it formally!

Update: Interpreting the data was much more challenging than I thought. Opportunity to have some fun getting my hands dirty :-).