The problem with this tsunami of data is two-fold:
- It’s coming from a variety of sources, making it messy and unstructured.
- The volume makes it difficult to manage and analyze.
That’s whats led to the rise of what Thomas Davenport of the Harvard Business Review calls the sexiest job of the 21st century – the Data Scientists.
Demand for Data Skills
Jeanne Harris of Accenture hit it on the head that “data is useless without the skills to analyze it.”
Data scientists help organizations make smarter business decisions using data-driven insights. They leverage a variety of tools, including business intelligence platforms and statistical models to improve business performance.
While the role of data scientists can be highly specialized and technical, there are broader marketplace demands for those who can understand, manipulate, analyze, and derive meaning from data.
A few years ago, being able to work a spreadsheet in Excel and create PivotTables might have been enough. But just as the quantities of data have grown, so have the demands for analysts.
Here is the problem: There just aren’t enough of these people to go around.
The US Bureau of Labor is predicting a 24 percent increase in demand for jobs with data analytics skills over the next eight years (IBM).
McKinsey shares that assessment, but notes that much of that demand will go unfulfilled, estimating that by 2018, the US alone could “face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions.”
This will have serious implications to both employers and job seekers.
(Next page: Big Data’s promising future)
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