Demand for computer analysts who have expertise and skill sets in big data is on the rise. With more than 50,000 openings this year alone, the IT sector is going for a boom both in terms of business and salaries, says Sanjeev Agrawal
A study by Forbes revealed that there was 89.9 per cent increase of demand for computer systems analysts with big data expertise in last 12 months. For the same time, demand for computer and information research scientist increased by 85.40 per cent. With such data at hand, the only conclusion, which can be drawn out is, big data is certainly the next boom in IT sector, both from the prospective of business as well as career.
The trends of hiring in big data suggest the necessities of huge work force in this domain. Data analytics is on mainstream as big data is being increasingly used in business. Career in this domain comprises of five skill sets. These are collection, transformation, analysis, mining and visualisation of the data. The requirement for expertise in big data is across diverse range of industry and occupation. Demand for information technology project managers with big data experience increased by 123.60 per cent. The industries with highest number of job openings for big data includes professional, scientific and technical services, information technologies, manufacturing, retail, sustainability and waste management.
Technical and scientific services offers the largest number of vacancies with 27.14 per cent of total positions. The next is information technologies with 18.89 per cent of overall job openings. Manufacturing creates 12.35 per cent and retail across various industries, big data jobs comprise of a number of positions or job roles.
Data scientist is the role that needs deep analytical talent. This can be regarded as a top position in big data jobs. People in this role are with strong mathematical background and in-depth knowledge traditional statistics. Data architects are associated with programming and ambiguous data. People in this position require creativity and persistence. Data visualisers are the ones who transform analytical data into relevant business information. They require good communication skills. The other roles are data change agents and data engineers.
Corporations find it tough to find people with right skill sets when hiring scale scores are set high. From prospective of salary, a career in big data is quite lucrative. The average salary in these trades, according to Forbes is $1,03,000 a year. Jobs in this category comprise of big data solution architect, linux systems experts and big data engineer, experts in Java, Hadoop and SQl. Data scientist is a core job profile in this domain. They develop the logical strategy to transform unorganised data into business relevant information.
Data scientists are responsible to design and implement processes for large-scale modeling, data mining and research. R is one of the crucial programming skills among the big data crowd. In 2011, a report was published by Mckinsey & Co, that there would be a shortage of 1.4 lakh to 1.9 lakh people with analytical talent by 2018. The same report suggested that the shortage for people capable of analysing data to enable business decision would be around 1.5 million.This information, in fact, is consistent with the present demand of skilled professionals in analytics and big data.
An observation on the prevalent business trend reveals that companies will be competing for talent acquisition for longer periods as long as they keep on taping big data for a competitive advantage in business and profit.In the current scenario, tech positions are tough to fill because of the large demand and lack of skilled professionals.
An increasing difficulty is experienced while balancing the skill sets and investment in an employee. Companies should justify the business that is made out of the analysed data relating it to resources. The new trend for big data hiring are into application developers and software engineers rather than IT operation professionals.
Operation specialists build the infrastructure and support for big data system. Most of the emergent jobs on big data require programming capability and skill for application development. Understanding business requirements and the ability to customise a solution in accordance with those requirements is what needed in big data. These factors, in return call another aspect: qualifications such as academic degrees, certifications, job titles and experience are no longer important. Rather qualities like soft skills, curiosity and ability to communicate will be required the most.
People who fit in multiple domains, who can acquire idea from a field and apply it on another sector, will be the most successful ones in this new career trend. Further, according to Wills, the big data crowd comprise of jacks-of-all-trades and masters of none. People who can relate to multiple domains of IT, software development, app development and analytics will become prominent contributors to this field. Big data is characterised by its increasing volume. This means the more it is be utilised, the more profit could be generated out of it. For this, companies will invest in work force, as technology that we have today, is not enough to work on the huge volume of these data sets.
(The writer is VP, operations & human empowerment at Impetus Technologies)