Why This is the Best Time to Learn R?

Everyone seems to be talking about data science these days. You go to meetups or keynote speeches, people are emphasizing the value of data science and analytics. You go hang out with your friends and one of them talks about careers and how data science seems to be the most viable option. It’s real and it’s everywhere. Even companies, ranging from a less-than-50-staff startups to tech mammoths, everyone’s investing on data science and data scientists. If you’re still unaware, data scientists are slowly changing the world right now.

From what you see on your recommendations cart on your preferred e-commerce platform to your smartphone telling you what time to leave for your movie, it’s all data science and its allied subject. From enhanced customer experience to product development, information extracted from the data you generate is slowly influencing the way IT is functioning right now. No wonder companies are paying a bomb to data scientists, who are skilled at what they do. Besides, tons of tech companies in India are also reinvesting on Big Data analytics and doing away with redundant skill sets and that’s why the competition for data science is becoming massive. There’s also news that over 50,000 jobs are waiting to be filled by data scientists in India alone.

With the competition being fierce, you need to stand out from your peers. You need to know something they don’t and have an edge over them. That is why you need to master R – one of the most popular data science tools. An open-source programming language, R is the best companion a data scientist can have. If you master it, you increase the chance to get employed and the chance to demand a salary package you deserve.

Why R?

Now R’s evolution has been gradual and substantial. Established in 1993 as one project, statisticians Ross and Robert wanted to set this up as a new portal to conduct researchers in statistical computing. Ever since its inception, it has grown and it now has over 20 prominent computer scientists and statisticians from across the globe under its leadership. Besides, R has a very strong research community. Apart from being earlier used for academic research, papers on this application in the field of data science, Machine Learning, and Statistics by researchers around the world has made R a powerhouse for data analytics. It allows anyone to publish researched package and make it available for people to use and it now has over 6000 packages contributed by R pros.

The massive community and the adoption of the programming language by industry players around the globe have made R a highly reliable tool for data analytics and today, R ranks 9^th in the list of the most popular programming languages in the world (according to IEEE Spectrum).

Some of the other beneficial aspects of R include its ability to handle petabytes of business data with ease and the seamless functionality it offers to data scientists when they work on clusters of unstructured and complex data. Plus, R is a complete package by itself, which means all the actions data scientists would need to do their job are all available in it. From actions to access data and its preparation to visualization, forecasting and modelling, they’re all made available in R’s base language.

R also is home for amazing tech innovations, where the best of tech companies work on gaining that minute innovative edge that will set them apart from their competitors. Data Scientists and Machine Learning specialists working on R can innovate today’s technology and come up with value additions to the products and services they offer, which further allow businesses to fetch financial gains. Since new and key innovations in Machine Learning and Statistics are done on R, data scientists working on this platform get the first access to such new technologies before they reach other proprietary systems, giving them a further edge.

The wisest of the souls have woken up to the importance of R and it’s time you should, too. If you didn’t know, R is used by Google to come up with its advert campaigns’ ROI, by Twitter to analyze and monitor customer experience, by Ford for improvements in its vehicles’ designing, for flood predictions by the US National Weather Service and more.

With R finding such a crucial place in the world of data science, it’s probably the decisive factor for your career’s success and growth. This is the perfect time for upskilling to analytics and if you’ve understood the inevitability of R in the industry, we recommend you get started with the programming language today.

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