The field of Data Science nowadays has evolved much more and has become the most demanded domain across industries. This field of study includes scientific methods, algorithms, processes, and systems to pull out meaningful insights from structured and unstructured data for effective decision making and predictions. Data science has made businesses across the world to assess market trends, envisage potential business risks, and make better decisions.
In India, businesses are quickly depending on this newly emerging field to garner more from their data and deliver more value to customers, leading to an increase in demand of data scientists. According to the Great Learning Report, the country is expected to see 1.5 lakh new openings in Data Science in 2020, an increase of nearly 62% compared to the previous year.
As the competitive business world is evolving than ever, understanding the users and their choices accurately has become critical for companies. This is where the role of data science comes into the scenario, making it possible to create and leverage time-saving automated models to get insights into a user’s purchase history, age, income level, and related demographics.
Since the data science field is rising at an unprecedented rate, the huge demand for data science talent with less than five years of work experience is most among BFSI (38%), followed by Energy (13%), Pharma and Healthcare (12%), and E-Commerce (11%), among others. BFSI is the highest average salary offered industry to a Data Scientist stood at INR 13.56 LPA, which is followed by manufacturing and healthcare (INR 11.8 LPA each), and IT (INR 10.06 LPA), the report noted.
As corporates across almost every industry are looking to acquire skilled and qualified talent who can navigate through everyday issues with innovative and right solutions, the supply of skilled professionals is far lesser than the demand. There are major skills gaps in the field of big data professionals (58%) in 2020 at a global level.
In order to close these gaps, academia, governments, as well as organizations, must carry out innovative ways to support future minds and derive value from that to have economic growth. There is a need to implement re-skilling and up-skilling initiatives for data scientists at both company and academic levels.
While the Great Learning report identified four unique career paths in the data science field including Data Analyst, Data Engineer, Data Scientist, and Business Intelligence Developer, the need for rapid up-skilling and adequate guidance has become indispensable. Moreover, investing in data-driven decisions and technology can also add value to businesses, easing the specialized talent shortage and enabling companies to drive efficiency.
