Data Scientist - 5 Things you can do to claim the title !

1. Know - What is Data Science?
The best definition I found for data science or data scientist is by Josh Wills, Director of Data Science at Cloudera:
"Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician"
You should view this presentation by Carlos Somohano founder of Data Science London to understand the big picture:

Big Data [sorry] & Data Science: What Does a Data Scientist Do? from Data Science London

2. Learn - R (basics and beyond)
If you did not ignore step#1 and absorbed the slides and links above then you probably know what R can do for you . The easiest way to learn R is to start programming with R. I recommend installing R studio on your laptop. This IDE comes with R help, console, workspace and editor all in one. Before you install R studio, install R first from this link.
If you are organized person, you start with official R tutorial.
If you are impatient and want to be able to use some built in packages to produce some nice plots, you follow this tutorial.
3. Learn - Machine Learning - Join Upcoming Courses on Coursera
If you have willingness to learn from the masters - you are in luck ! Coursera is starting free course on Data Science on May 1st.
You can find other related free courses on Statistics and Machine Learning !
4. Learn Python - yes, you will be glad you did !
Again, my favorite place - Coursera. Check the course - An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python. It is starting on April 15 - see its your lucky day !

5. Last but not least - show some of your good work to world and claim your title !
Create some cool analytic project, show off the model you have developed - make sure put it on github
link the project to your linkedin profile and claim the title you have been craving for !
Also try to validate your "Data Scientist" position by participating at Kaggle - an online community of Data Scientists.