Data Specialist Education Requirements And Courses

Data specialist education requirements

Updated January 8, 2025

2 min read

Usually, data specialists don't need a college education. The most common degree for data specialists is bachelor's degree with 56% graduates, with only 20% data specialist graduates earning associate degree. Data specialists who decided to graduate from college often finish University of Phoenix or University of Washington. Some good skills to have in this position include data analysis, data entry and data collection.

Popular data specialist certifications include Certified Billing and Coding Specialist (CBCS), Geographic Information Systems Professional (GISP), or Certified Phlebotomy Technician (CPT). To improve data specialist qualification and skills, we prepared some online courses to help in data specialist education paths.

What education do you need to become a data specialist?

What degree do you need to be a data specialist?

The most common degree for data specialists is bachelor's degree, with 56% of data specialists earning that degree. The second and third most common degree levels are associate degree degree at 20% and associate degree degree at 9%.

Bachelor's, 56%

Associate, 20%

Master's, 9%

High School Diploma, 8%

Other Degrees, 7%

What should I major in to become a data specialist?

You should major in business to become a data specialist. 29% of data specialists major in business. Other common majors for a data specialist include computer science and psychology.

Business, 29%

Computer Science, 7%

Psychology, 7%

Accounting, 6%

Other Majors, 51%

Best majors for data specialists

Rank	Major	Percentages
1	Business	29.3%
2	Computer Science	6.8%
3	Psychology	6.7%
4	Accounting	5.8%
5	Computer Information Systems	5.2%

Show more common data specialist majors

20 best online courses for data specialists

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1. Fundamentals of Data Analysis for Big Data

4.5

(270)

This course prepares participants to begin running data analysis on databases...

2. Complete Data Wrangling & Data Visualisation With Python

4.4

(853)

Learn to Preprocess, Wrangle and Visualise Data For Practical Data Science Applications in Python...

3. Statistics / Data Analysis: Survey Data and Likert Scales

4.6

(505)

How to Process Survey Data and Analyze Likert Scales In SPSS...

4. The Data Science Course: Complete Data Science Bootcamp 2023

4.6

(130,823)

Complete Data Science Training: Mathematics, Statistics, Python, Advanced Statistics in Python, Machine & Deep Learning...

5. Tableau Data Analyst/Specialist Desktop Certification

4.6

(12,896)

From beginners to skills needed for Data Analyst or Desktop Specialist certifications. Tableau 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020...

6. Data Warehouse ETL Testing & Data Quality Management A-Z

4.4

(2,977)

ETL Testing and Data Quality Management for beginners with practical exercises and certificate of completion...

7. Data Science:Data Mining & Natural Language Processing in R

4.7

(387)

Harness the Power of Machine Learning in R for Data/Text Mining, & Natural Language Processing with Practical Examples...

8. Core Spatial Data Analysis: Introductory GIS with R and QGIS

4.4

(1,989)

Become Proficient In Spatial Data Analysis Using R & QGIS By Working On A Real Project - Get A Job In Spatial Data!...

9. Data Entry Skills: A Complete Data Entry Course from Scratch

4.7

(533)

A Complete Guide to Data Entry Skills: Learn Data Entry Skills and become a Data Entry Pro & Get a Online Data Entry Job...

10. Data Analysis with Pandas and Python

4.6

(20,640)

Analyze data quickly and easily with Python's powerful pandas library! All datasets included --- beginners welcome!...

11. Data Integration Guide

4.5

(4,391)

Learn how data can be integrated : following which principles and for what business outcomes...

12. Statistics / Data Analysis in SPSS: Inferential Statistics

4.7

(1,622)

Increase Your Data Analytic Skills – Highly Valued And Sought After By Employers...

13. Data Engineering - ETL, Web Scraping ,Big Data,SQL,Power BI

4.2

(300)

Hands on Data Interaction using - ETL, Web Scraping ,Big Data,SQL,Power BI...

14. Streaming Big Data with Spark Streaming and Scala

4.7

(3,391)

Spark Streaming tutorial covering Spark Structured Streaming, Kafka integration, and streaming big data in real-time...

15. R Level 1 - Data Analytics with R

4.6

(3,228)

Use R for Data Analytics and Data Mining...

16. Data Quality Fundamentals

4.2

(557)

Understand key concepts, principles and terminology related to Data Quality...

17. R Programming: Advanced Analytics In R For Data Science

4.7

(8,622)

Take Your R & R Studio Skills To The Next Level. Data Analytics, Data Science, Statistical Analysis in Business, GGPlot2...

18. Data Science Bootcamp 2022: 5 Data Science Projects

4.5

(745)

Data Science and Machine Learning Masterclass with Python with 5 Data Science Real World Projects...

19. Data Science for Professionals

4.2

(270)

It's time to leave spreadsheets behind.....

20. Data Engineering using AWS Data Analytics

4.6

(1,720)

Build Data Engineering Pipelines on AWS using Data Analytics Services - Glue, EMR, Athena, Kinesis, Lambda, Redshift...

Average data specialist salary by education level

Data specialists with a Bachelor's degree earn more than those without, at $74,700 annually. With a Master's degree, data specialists earn a median annual income of $73,941 compared to $68,356 for data specialists with an High School Diploma degree.

Data specialist education level	Data specialist salary
Master's Degree	$73,941
High School Diploma or Less	$68,356
Bachelor's Degree	$74,700
Some College/ Associate Degree	$67,621