Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, gave a nice summary of a major need of our era.
Emphasis added:
“The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it.
“I think statisticians are part of it, but it’s just a part. You also want to be able to visualize the data, communicate the data, and utilize it effectively. … being able to access, understand, and communicate the insights you get from data analysis —are going to be extremely important.”
Data Enhanced 