It has become vital to pay attention to Big Data as it is not just a buzz word anymore. According to Forbes, it is on its way to becoming a movement. Big Data is one of the biggest trends in IT today and continues to grow as businesses see the importance of making data-driven decisions. With vast amounts of data being produced in real-time, there is a huge demand for people with skills to manage, analyze and help organizations use this data effectively.
Let’s take a look at how Big Data market is predicted to be and how the demand for Big Data skills and job opportunities will be in the upcoming years.
How the Big Data Market is Doing – Future Predictions:
According to the IDC forecast, the Big Data market is predicted to be worth $46.34 billion by 2018 and is expected to have a sturdy growth across Big Data related infrastructure, software and services over the next five years. IDC also predicts that the Big Data technology and the associated services market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23.1% over the period of 2014-2019 with annual spending reaching $48.6 billion in 2019. Hadoop which has become almost synonymous with Big Data is predicted to grow at 58.2% CAGR between 2013 and 2020.
The predictions by IDC are positively optimistic. Adding to this, Alex Rossino, a senior principal research analyst at Deltek, also reports that information security policies and management programs in the federal government are driving agencies to invest in cloud computing and Big Data technologies. According to an article published by him, Deltek has forecasted that federal agencies will collectively increase their spending on cloud computing services from $2.4 billion during fiscal 2015 to $6.2 billion by fiscal 2020.
As per IDC, the availability and skill level of Big Data and analytics talent will have a direct impact on the market. But it looks like it is vice versa as well. The demand for a particular skill and the growth of that skill goes hand-in-hand.
Big Data Implementation:
According to a Big Data Survey by Knowledgent, there are clear indicators that Big Data is moving out of the experimental stage. Many respondents of this survey firmly believe that many organizations would be utilizing Big Data in the production environment and over 60% of them responded that Big Data initiatives are very or extremely important to their organizations. More than 25% of respondents mentioned that they have already implemented a Big Data solution in their organization while others indicated that they were less than six months away from doing so.
Big Data Jobs in 2016 and Coming Years
According to Forbes, the top five industries hiring Big Data-related skills are Professional, Scientific and Technical Services, IT, Manufacturing, Finance, Insurance and Retail. The graph below shows the distribution of job openings in the above-mentioned sectors:
Forbes also reports that the demand for sales representatives that are skilled in selling Big Data solutions are going through the roof and will continue to do so into 2016 and upcoming years. Big Data-related jobs like Information Security Analysts, Management Analysts, Management Analysts and Information Security Analyst continue to be in high demand.
Companies Looking For Big Data Skills:
EMC, IBM, Cisco, Oracle are just a few of the top companies who are looking for Big Data skills. Here’s a distribution of job requirements of the top ten Big Data employers today, according to WantedAnalytics.
Big Data Job Titles:
Here are some job titles that would provide you with full range of opportunities when looking for Big Data-related jobs. Take a look at it and expand your search terms.
- Data
- Scientist
- Data Engineer
- Big Data Engineer
- Machine Learning Scientist
- Business Analytics Specialist
- Data Visualization Developer
- Business Intelligence (BI) Engineer
- BI Solutions Architect
- BI Specialist
- Analytics Manager
- Machine Learning Engineer
- Statistician
Demand for Big Data Skills:
The Big Data market grows, so does the demand for skilled workers. Companies today realize the value of data and analytics and, as a result, they are looking for skilled people to comprehend this data and make sense of it. Job portals like Indeed, Dice, Glassdoor and many more provide a clear picture about the demand for Big Data jobs. Although Big Data is a broad term, it is a commonly used term in job listings, along with data analysts, data scientists and other important roles within the data industry. According to WantedAnalytics, a best practice insight and technology company, the Big Data skill was mentioned 112,469 times in the first six months of 2015, representing an increase of a 118% over the previous year. Like Big Data, Hadoop is also an extremely broad area. It was mentioned 31,274 times in the first six months of the year and is growing faster with a 118% growth rate.
Technology changes frequently, and so does the buzzwords. Big Data, which was one of the most-used terms until recently, has been replaced with ‘real-time’. This doesn’t mean that the demand for Big Data skills is down – It simply means that the keep word has been replaced. Textion, a Seattle-based startup has verified the same after studying 500,000 job applications applying for Big Data related jobs.
According to IDG Enterprise Big Data Research, in the next 12-18 months, organizations plan to invest in skill sets necessary for Big Data deployments, including Data Scientists, Data Architects, Data Analysts, Data Visualizers, Research Analysts, and Business Analysts.
Bridging the Big Data Skills Gap
Even though there is a huge demand for Big Data skills there is still a significant gap when it comes to availability of skills. As a result, many Big Data technology vendors are trying to close this gap by training their in-house professionals. This skill gap is a bottleneck that must be eliminated for Big Data skilled professionals to be accepted as a part of the mainstream. The ‘Annual IT Forecast’ by TEKsystems also confirms the much-publicized skills shortage and also that analytics jobs are getting harder to fill.
And according to a survey by Knowledgent, over 55% of respondents have identified that finding resources with the required Big Data skills prove to be either very or extremely challenging
Big Data Skills for Bigger Paychecks
If you are looking to add Big Data skills to your profile, there are more reasons for you to go for it right now. A new salary survey from O’Reilly shows which skills command a high salary and Big Data is on the very top. According to Indeed, the average salary for Big Data professional is about 114,000 USD per annum, which is about 98% higher than average salaries for all job postings nationwide.
And Glassdoor quotes the median salary for professionals with Big Data expertise to be 104,850 USD per annum and Data Scientists can expect a salary of about $115,000. Forbes also estimates the median advertised salary for professional is 124,000 USD per annum. Here’s the distribution of median salaries across various industries.
Image source: Forbes
As Big Data gathers momentum, it is creating huge career opportunities for IT professionals with the right skillset. With companies scurrying around for Big Data skilled professionals, this is an apt time to gather the necessary skills to land the job. There is no doubt that that With Big Data skills your value in the IT jobs market increases significantly.
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