What Skills Does a Data Architect Need to Possess?

There are some prerequisite skills that a data architect must possess. Here is a list of some must-have skills for a data architect.

Qualifications to Become a Data Architect

• Years of experience in database administration, systems engineering, and administration. A data architect should understand the basics of the system development life cycle, and design, and test software application development approaches.
• Ability to design and develop data modeling, data flow structures, and data warehouses. A skilled data architect must have sound knowledge of all phases of data modeling from conceptualization to data optimization. This also includes SQL development and database management.
• Possessing research and development strategies for data collection, migration, and retrieval.
• Understanding of data security measures for data systems.

Data Architect Hard Skills

• Expertise in data modeling, database management systems, data warehouses, and data containers.
• Expertise in data modeling and designing tools.
• Skill in carrying data security and compliance processes
• Knowledge of systems development life cycle, project management techniques, design, and testing procedures.
• Knowledge of big data tools, data analysis tools, and techniques.
• Skill in cloud computing technologies and knowledge of DevOps practices.
• Understanding of NLP and text analysis, predictive modeling, and machine learning.

Data Architect Soft Skills

• Critical thinking skills
• Agile methodologies
• Problem-solving skills
• Communication skills

Tools Used by Data Architects

• Amazon RDS
• C
• C++
• ER/Studio
• IBM Db2
• Java
• Microsoft Azure SQL database

Don’t you think there is a lot of buzz about data or big data these days? Almost every organization, big or small, leverages the power of data to find useful insights, deploy strategies, make informed decisions, and run business operations smoothly. 52% of the enterprises are actively analyzing data to make operational decisions and make decisions globally while 71% of the organizations believe that their spending on data will increase over the next four years.

With this, several new organizational roles have emerged. One of those is that of a data architect. Data architects implement IT and programming expertise to design data management systems. A data architect is often interchanged with a data analyst or data engineer. But this is not true!

Let us explain to you here the roles and responsibilities of a data architect, the skills of a data architect, and what one needs to become a data architect.