Want to join Scotland’s £17bn data revolution?
Picture the scenario: you're located in a leading UK technology centre such as Scotland with a data sector worth a healthy £17bn. You need skilled and qualified data professionals – but where do you find 'em?
The good news is that Scottish data innovation centre, Data Lab, is offering 90 MSc places for 2016/17 across seven Scottish universities, more than double the places funded across three universities previously.
All students on The Data Lab MSc are being offered a paid, credit-bearing three-month industrial placement, with MBN Solutions, one of Europe’s leading data science and big data recruiters, helping to place the MSc graduates into organisations. The result? Scotland could be teeming with skilled professionals that you’re looking for.
A data science community
The Data Lab innovation centre was launched in 2014 to help companies and organisations take advantage of the opportunities provided by making better use of data.
The organisation helps industry, the public sector and world-class university researchers to innovate and develop new data science capabilities through collaboration. Its core mission is to help organisations generate significant economic, social and scientific value from data.
How? With a Scotland-wide presence and hubs in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, it is in close proximity to leading industry and university institutions that are doing specialised research in informatics and computer science.
Cecilia Bouroncle, the Data Lab’s marketing and communications officer, says: “We are not only trying to help build Scotland’s data science capability and talent base – we are also trying to create a data science community, one where industry and academia can work together for the benefit of Scotland.
“Our collaborative approach allows us to link those two sides of the equation, introducing industry to the best data science minds in Scotland, and allowing those scientists to add insight and value to industry data.
Companies often find themselves with a variety of customer or process data that they do not know how to analyse, mine or exploit. We can find and co-fund academics to work with them to extract value from that data."
Attracting worldwide talent
With a long history of producing skilled data scientists, Scotland has experience in using data to stimulate economic growth. This is a welcome benefit to many organisations, including Scottish fintechs with highly-skilled tech professionals who excel in making data work hard for businesses.
Gillian Docherty, CEO of the Data Lab, said:
"Scotland has the academic acumen and the talent to be able to innovate in the use of data.
"We are attracting worldwide talent, who are coming not only to study in Scotland but also to stay in Scotland and get access to great careers and opportunities."
By working with Scotland's talented people, you can ensure your data delivers the unique business insights that can help your company grow.
Connected for data
The Data Lab's bases in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen enable its staff to be close to important industry hubs across a range of sectors.
But, as Gillian Docherty explained, Scotland's infrastructure makes it easy to build connections across the country and beyond:
Scotland feels very connected. Despite the fact we're based in three different locations, we work as one team. We find it very easy to get to the rest of the UK, Europe and globally."
Scotland's data revolution
Scotland offers data science talent, a sector worth £17bn and the chance to develop an efficient and innovative data science community.