Dear Biostars members
I am relatively new to bioinformatics, I know few things here and there, I use illumine workflows and pipelines for our miseq in a clinical setting (GUI). My background is molecular biology with a MSc.
I'm interested to get more deeper knowledge in bioinformatics, maybe taking a graduate certificate, online certificate or MSc course in bioinformatics, but the thing is alot of companies advertise for their software as an easy to use with no bioinformatics experience is needed to analyze your data. So basically, one or two lab staff needed to be trained on how to use that package and that lab set to go...
Do you think this will affect bioinformaticians in the future, maybe in a clinical setting lab this will be a possible thing..but what about industry jobs prospect?
Don't know if I should go with my plan and invest time and effort to get a degree or...
It really depends on whether you are talking about an R&D setting or a clinical / quality control setting. In the latter case, where data are routinely produced in the same way and need to be analyzed the same way every time, you would only need someone with a deep understanding to initially work out how the analyses should be done. Running the same analysis over and over again does not require a degree in bioinformatics. However, in an R&D setting where the experimental setup and the questions constantly change, clicking buttons in a GUI won't do - you need to actually understand what is done to the data to choose the right methods.
If you believe that to be true then it would be best to stay away from bioinformatics :)
What? Are you trying to tell me that after buying a couple of Geneious licenses for the lab we still have to deal with bioinformaticians? Sacrilege!