Communications of the ACM
Data Scientists Most Sought After
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There is a growing demand by U.S. employers for data scientists who can analyze and manipulate the mountains of information generated and stored in the Internet era. In fact, in most areas of the modern economy, math and statistics have never been more important, leading Harvard Business Review to call this profession "the sexiest job of the 21st century." As firms become more and more data-driven, there will be fewer and fewer careers that don't require those skills. Unlike statisticians of a previous generation, data scientists work with information sets so big that they need to write extensive computer code to extract the right data.
Today, data analysts are among the most commonly advertised positions in the technology sector, based on an analysis of online job postings. The national security industry is among the biggest employers of Big Data professionals. However, almost every company has a need for data scientists — from news sites that need to know which stories are keeping readers most engaged, to marketers and advertisers, who want to know how specific campaigns are performing.
The challenge for employers is that there aren't enough data scientists out there. By 2020, all the digital data created, replicated, and consumed in a single year will grow to 40,000 exabytes, or 40 trillion gigabytes, according to a December 2012 study by technology research firm IDC. That's a 300-fold increase from the 130 exabytes in 2005. By 2018, the U.S. may face a shortage of as many as 190,000 people with deep analytical skills and 1.5 million managers and analysts who know how to use big data to make decisions, McKinsey Global Institute said in a report in 2011. These data scientists need multiple skills — programming, statistics, data visualization, and database skills. Businesses are improvising, pulling people from all kinds of scientific backgrounds that require an understanding of statistics.
From Bloomberg LP
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