I am a B.Tech in biotechnology and have very little knowledge in programming languages. Currently, I am working in IT as a QA engineer/BA for the last 3 years. How can I make my career in data science?

As u said that u have little knowledge of programming u should make that up to the mark then only you can do good as a data scientist. Make your algorithms and data structure knowledge very strong. For that u can refer the algorithm courses offered on coursera. Once you are done with the algorithms your are ready to jump into data science to play with all the data. There is a series of course on data science which are pretty good. Sign up for that courses and then enjoy your journey. I just came across this great list on facebook hope this help you also https://www.facebook.com/notes/hh-data-hackers/lrn2data-resources-for-learning-about-data-science-machine-learning/572755009522579 "Do not go gentle into that good night " -Dylan Thomas :) Happy learning!!!

Data science is a technique to extract information from raw data. This data may be in any form, if it's structured it's good and if unstructured we call it Big Data. Say for example you want to analyze the purchase patterns of customers visiting onto an ecommerce site like Amazon, imagine the number of transactions you would have each day. You would end up into millions of data rows if you were to analyze the data for just 1 month. So, this is typically not possible to do it manually in excel. Hence you need the knowledge of programming wherein you may use it to analyze this data. Remember, as a data scientist you need to know programming from a data scientist point of view and not as an IT programmer. You won't see data scientists building web applications or other softwares. More importantly, data science is not only about programming, you should also have an idea of the statistical concepts and an understanding of how to apply them in the business scenario. Hence, every IT professional is not a data scientist. As Vivek pointed out, you may find some courses on Coursera. But if you are looking for a more structured training from experts, with projects on real world data, you may find the Business Analytics program offered by Edzyme Academy interesting.  http://www.edzyme.com/analytics-training/certified-professional-in-business-analytics-cpba- Please note: I lead the organization, so have interest in it.

Making your career in data science is easy.You can always do a course at an institute that provides you career assistance. At Imarticus Learning, we offer a certification in Data Science and SAS. In this short term program, we offer classroom training in this program. This is an indepth course with mentorship. We also offer career assistance at the end of the course where we offer mock interviews, and resume building help, along with a few industry leads and references.Want to know more? Our website has more details! Visit http://imarticus.org/certification-in-data-science-and-sas-program

I believe as a QA/BA you have acquired a good deal of knowledge in a certain domain. The next logical step would be to leverage that knowledge and gain expertise in some new areas like statistics, databases, statistical tools etc. Here is a list of topics:http://analyticscosm.com/how-to-become-a-data-scientist-2/ with links to free resources about where to study those topics from- so I'm not delving deeper into that.What I would really emphasize here is that you should follow a steady routine for:a). Mastering as many topics as possible in the above list and b). Building a resume- by participating in competitions, hackathons etc. as well as undertaking different projects that concerns your domain area. If you can make a plan for the next 6 months and rigorously follow that I'm sure the results will be quite fruitful.

There are lots of great content on Quora regarding this! Please take a look at following: Perhaps all your questions would be answered if go through the questions in the link provided. All the best!