Be a good developer and love working with data. Java is the most common language of the open source big data tools. If you're a statistician learn to code, and if you're a developer you should have a good data intuition.

You might work for a while with a consulting firm like Think Big Analytics to get some solid experience with the major tools.

At Quantcast, we process 10 petabytes a day but few people we hired had a big data background. We actually told the sourcers to stop using Hadoop as a search keyword because so many people add it to their resumes, whether or not they know how to work with data.