For the question of education, generally speaking, when you don't have any foundation, the only thing you can take is your education, and undergraduates certainly can't compete with graduate students. But as you work for a long time, your ability to meet the requirements of the position, the education is not important. Especially for the business ability to require higher data analysts, data mining division of these positions, your industry knowledge and business understanding in many cases more important than the degree.

Although education is the threshold, specialist and above can basically meet the requirements of data analytics, but really decide whether you can enter the industry or your technology.

Of course, high-end talents (such as algorithm engineers, data scientists) also have a higher education, if all aspects of the conditions allow, the choice of computational mathematics/probability theory/pattern recognition/computer aspects of the postgraduate study is also necessary, some large companies do screen people based on their education in the initial screening, which is also very normal. So, you can also work a few years later, when you feel to the basic bottleneck, and then go to the choice of academic upgrading, this time you may be more clear about what you need.

In short, for students entering this industry, you can choose to go to graduate school and then enter the industry, you can also be employed first, with your work experience to make up for your lack of education. But, big data is a very practical subject, from the actual work of the knowledge and ability is you can not learn inside the school, the enterprise is ultimately also valued your practical work ability.