Data Science: Career of the future

More and more organisations are relying on data-driven decision making skills that has further pushed the demand for individuals trained in handling huge amounts of data and making sense of it.

The demand for data science roles is growing at a staggering rate of 50%, as per the Dice 2020 Tech job report.

Given this astounding rise in the demand, there exists an acute shortage of data scientists. A study conducted by McKinsey Global Institute highlighted that there will be a shortage of nearly 2 lakh data scientists by 2028 in the US alone.

At the global stage, and especially in consumer markets like India, the shortage is projected to be even more acute.

Irrespective of the industry, the mean salaries of data scientists have steadily remained significantly higher.

For instance, according to data from Glassdoor, in India, the average salary of a data scientist is around Rs 10.58 lakhs per annum, compared to the national average of Rs 3.93 lakhs.

Additionally, these salary figures tend to vary based upon the years of work experience, location, employer, industry, and educational qualifications. Nevertheless, as the trend of big data is continuing to grow, companies are rushing to hire data science professionals.

Arguably though, the Indian economic landscape provides immense opportunities to aspiring data scientists.

With the growing usage of smartphones and apps in India, the need to include data-driven decisions across industries is poised to rise. As a result, more and more universities and institutes are offering course in data science to ensure a steady supply of this skilled workforce. These is still a dearth of full-time courses in this field and a lot more needs to be done in this regard by Indian universities.

Disciplines in data science

A successful data scientist must be skilled in three disciplines – statistics, computer science, and management.

Besides this, industry professionals need to be skilled in several competencies such as, deep and machine learning, applied mathematics, visualisation, working knowledge of Hadoop and Spark, Programming languages such as R and Python, among others.

Apart from data scientists, learners can opt for job roles such as business analysts, data engineer, data architect, data administrators, data visualisation specialists, big data engineers, and more.

Therefore, data science provides a huge amount of opportunities and getting this skill has become more important than ever.

(The author is a faculty member at a private educational institution)