Quick. At the top of your head, think about a profession that has many open positions in the market. It’s not engineering. It’s not commerce or the arts. It’s data science and its better-known subset machine learning.
Did you know that data science was once termed to be the hottest job creator for the 21st century. It goes without saying that the large data generation coupled with the technology to play around with the data has given birth to a profession where the demands overrun the supply by a large margin.
Getting Straight To The Facts
- In India alone, you will find that data science courses and machines learning are the hottest and trending topics of interest not limited to the IT sector alone but also for other industries.
- Platforms like Thomson Reuters and Great Learning indicate that more than 50,000 positions related to data and data analytics are currently open for the taking in India.
- The number of postings reached an all-time high towards the end of 2017 and had been rising to a constant range over the following months.
- The reports also indicate that India currently contributes nearly 12 per cent of all data science positions when compared to the rest of the world.
- Sectors like banking, finance, e-commerce, media, marketing and healthcare account for more than 67 per cent of the positions spanned mainly over eleven primary Indian states with the highest concentration being from metropolitan centers and urban districts.
- Similar reports suggest that the banking and financial services are the biggest market for data analytics and data science professionals and are expected to create at least 58 per cent of all jobs for the year 2018. E-commerce is accounted for 17 per cent of the total job share.
Looking At The Factors
- It is undeniable to say that there has been a rapid rise in the number of colleges and institutions offering data science training, data analyst training but the striking fact is that such skills are becoming increasingly common with completely unrelated professions as well.
- Employers are no longer looking for candidates with a working level of understanding of computers but rather those who can utilize and leverage the data towards producing meaningful results.
- The large gap in the employment sector has been linked to the lack of institutions that properly prepare candidates for the tasks at hand. While there may have been an explosion of data science learning institutes all over the country, quick studies of the curriculum show a stark difference from what the industry is currently looking from.
- Government statistics, on the other hand, argue that while more and more data scientists and data analysts are being funneled out, nearly 44 per cent of fresh graduates choose
to work elsewhere outside the country or shift to another position due to dissatisfactions with the pay.
- It should, however, interest people that average pay scales for data science positions are heavily influenced by the industry the candidate chooses to work in. Top level startups offer initial pays ranging from 89-91 K per year but tend to be higher for well-established companies.
Where The Road Leads Ahead
- Software and data science tools like Hadoop, SPSS, SAS, Python and IBM Watson are expected to be the next frontier for leading changes to the data science career as a whole and will likely be the most sought-after skills in the future.
- More than 39,000 analytics jobs are anticipated to be created in India by 2020 with cyber-security taking an 11 per cent share, healthcare taking up 55 per cent, engineering studies taking up 8 per cent and space exploration 16 per cent.
- Besides these, agriculture and aviation too will be engaged heavily with data analytic jobs as well as automation and the new buzzword driver less transportation.
