Communications of the ACM
The Future of Work: It's Data, Baby
Credit: West Virginia University
In the IT job market, significant opportunities only reveal themselves when examining both the available jobs and the underlying trends in demand for skills. Based on both of these factors, a number of experts are predicting that IT jobs that involve first-hand knowledge of data and statistics will be the wave of the future. For example, The New York Times recently suggested that a prominent job within the next ten years would be statistician. Meanwhile, experts writing about the post-Web 2.0 world talk about a smarter Web extending into the real world through sensor applications, leading to a proliferation of data and the ability to manage it. There are important trends leading to demand for data-related jobs, giving job seekers an opportunity to exploit them.
Thought leaders such as Google Chief Economist Hal Varian are predicting that statisticians will be the hot profession as their skills are increasingly in demand. As suggested by Daniel Pink, the ability to extract stories from a world of increasing and abundant data will be increasingly critical to many industries. Indeed, the opening of U.S. federal government data and the appointment of Sir Tim Berners-Lee to similarly open the UK's data archive implies a new societal and cultural importance for workers who can extract meaning from data. For example, IBM is preparing to expand its data analysis employee base from 200 to 4,000. A significant portion of this new work force will be distributed widely across the globe, implying that one of the core skills for a new generation of Web workers will be analysis.
From Web Worker Daily
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