If you have a passion for using computers and solving complex problems and puzzles, learning data manipulation may lead to a variety of opportunities as a data scientist. These opportunities include becoming a data analyst, a data engineer, or a machine learning engineer. Tasks you might encounter during a typical workday in these fields include cluster analysis and creating a pivot table or a lookup table. If you want a very hands-on career that puts you in control of finding the most essential items in a company's data, learning data manipulation will help you get started in the field.