OPM’s new ‘data scientist’ job title aims to boost recruitment
- By Sherkiya Wedgeworth
- Jul 01, 2019
As the field of “data science” continues to grow in the workforce, the Office of Personnel Management is seeking to keep up with the pace and has issued guidance on how agencies can incorporate and recognize the field into federal agencies.
Data scientists “are defined as practitioners with sufficient knowledge in the areas of business needs, domain knowledge, analytical skills, and software and systems engineering to manage the end-to-end data processes in the data life cycle,” according to new guidance.
OPM is giving agency human resources officers details on how they can classify the position for their own agencies.
Their work involves data analysis, analytical applications, big data engineering, algorithms, domain expertise (e.g., data cleansing, data management, analytics, visualization and engineering), statistics and machine learning.
Data science work can be found in epidemiology, actuarial science, operations research, statistics, and information technology among other roles.
The OPM is working with the Office of Management and Budget and the Chief Information Officer (CIO) Council to explore data scientist work in the federal government further.