Can a data engineer become a good data scientist?

There is no doubt that a data engineer is equipped with the necessary technical skills and acumen to become a good data scientist – but there is no guarantee to it as the primary skillsets of a data scientist is not only to engineer or transform data but to model it in a way that actionable and relevant insights can be drawn from the data.
The advantage that a data engineer has in the quest of becoming a data scientist over and above other candidates is that they would have a better know-how of data and would be able to identify anomaly must faster than other candidates.

Of course! You do have to be mindful of a couple of things, though:

  • The skill sets of these two differ slightly, which means that you’ll need to pay some attention to learning (quite) a lot more about mathematics and statistics, for example. This mostly depends on your previous background, of course, but since a data scientist position usually focuses on different things, you’ll see that you’ll probably want to learn more about data visualization, too, for example.

  • In accordance with your skill set, you’ll see that you probably also want to focus on other tools as well, such as R, SAS, Tableau, pandas, etc.