“Data is the new oil” said Clive Humby, a renowned mathematician. In a world where 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day, it’s no surprise why data science jobs are in the new hot commodity.
With a median salary of $107,801 and job satisfaction level of 4 out of 5, it makes sense to consider it as a career option.
Data science jobs ranked No.3 on Glassdoor’s list of best jobs in America 2020 — after being consistently ranked as the No. 1 career option since 2016.
What’s more, data scientists have also been ranked as No.3 in LinkedIn’s Emerging Jobs Report 2020. So this career option is on track to stay and flourish.
What Does a Data Scientist Do?
Data science combines multiple disciplines like statistics, data analyst, machine learning, big data, and computer science. Sounds confusing and daunting? A data scientist’s job requires him to wear many hats and organizations define the role of their data scientists differently.
In some cases, this position is used as a blanket job title to describe roles that might look drastically different from each other. You must read through the job description thoroughly and make a decision based on your skills and experience. Some enterprises may even offer you on-the-job data science training courses to ensure you have the latest skills. Our blog on the four different types of data science jobs might be helpful in obtaining a better understanding.
Apart from data scientist, some of the other popular data scientist job titles are:
- Data Analyst
- Data Engineer
- Data Architect
- Business Analyst
- Business Intelligence Manager
If you look at some of the job descriptions for these titles, you’ll understand that many overlap in terms of responsibilities. However, there may be differences for each job as each company defines the role differently.
Who’s Hiring for Data Scientists?
Short answer — nearly everyone!
If you look at Glassdoor there are currently around 22,000 data science jobs open in the United States. A quick search on LinkedIn shows around 14,500 results and Indeed.com shows more than 7,500 results.
And why not? Almost every company in the world is facing the challenge to manage and analyze its data. In fact, the Big Data revolution has led to an exponential growth in the size of data teams across global organizations.
Here are some of the companies with large data related workforces:
- IBM (2,563 data workers)
- Amazon (1,846 data workers)
- Microsoft (1,800 data workers)
- Facebook (1,220 data workers)
- Oracle (1,210 data workers)
- Google (904 data workers)
- Apple (568 data workers)
What’s more, the population of data-related employees had a global surge. The United States has around 152,068 data professionals, India has around 27,602 data professionals, the UK has more than 16,106 data professionals, and France has 10,297 data professionals. These are some of the top countries with a sizable number of data scientists and a burgeoning demand, according to TechRepublic.
How Can You Get a Data Science Job?
“In terms of raw numbers, it’s much higher (total comp, salary, equity, benefits, growth opportunity, etc.). But, it’s at the upper-end of the market rate for mid-to-senior level data scientists in the Bay Area. I did really well in my interviews, so that helped me a lot.”
Adrian Lievano, a Udacity Data Science Nanodegree graduate – about his job as a data scientist:
Most data science jobs require the following skills:
- Programming tools like Python and R
- Data visualization
- Statistics
- Machine learning
Upskill yourself by choosing the right Nanodegree program from our School of Data Science.
Once, you have the basic knowledge, you can prepare yourself for a data science job by completing our Data Scientist Nanodegree program.
What are you waiting for? Take a step towards your dream data science job now!
