Who says there aren’t any jobs in this market?
Well, pretty much everyone who isn’t a data analyst.
In our post, The “Big Data” Revolution, we brought up the fact that 58% of big data projects by companies last year have remained incomplete. One of the most glaring reasons for this: no one knows what they’re doing – and no one can find the people who do.
As featured in Forbes, recently, Hilary Mason, chief scientist for the URL shortening service bit.ly, said that a data scientist must have three key skills. “They can take a data set and model it mathematically and understand the math required to build those models; they can actually do that, which means they have the engineering skills…and finally they are someone who can find insights and tell stories from their data. That means asking the right questions, and that is usually the hardest piece.”
So why isn’t ever job-market-fearing-college-student not signing up for these college courses to guarantee high demand employment? Where are these diploma carrying heroes of the new age? It turns out… they haven’t even developed the courses yet. We are in a time of such flux and innovation that the collegiate class cannot possibly keep up – and each day, as more data is collected without being intelligibly curated – the problem becomes ever more overwhelming.
So what is the solution?
As new as this field is, we have been here before. Some may remember when IBM developed an entire generation of Cobol programmers. Those who invested in forward-thinking, innovation-driving tech companies like IBM have been none the sorrier for it, either. When everyone else knew what they wanted to do, IBM provided the how.
So now what?
We wait – and if we’re feeling lucky – we bet – on which tech-savvy enterprise will raise up the next generation of techies. With that, the Data Revolution is here and very, very unclear. Leave us a comment here or on twitter. @NAICSCode -Which big name do you think will bring about the data analyst revolution?