COVID-19 is a big hit to the world economy and havoc to society. It is infecting millions of people with alarming speed and the economic damage caused by this virus is the largest in decades. According to Global Economic Prospects, Global GDP will witness a reduction of 5.2 per cent in 2020 – the biggest global recession happened in decades. The recession triggered by this deadly virus persists in society for some time and will leave scars in business activities.
In this uncertainty, firms are now focusing on reducing the cost, which pops up a question ‘Whether the demand for analytics and data science slow during this pandemic?’
When the firms focus on cost-cutting, they use principal measurements like ROI (Return on Investment) in determining the needs of the resource. But ROI in Data Science is a big task as many algorithms were never deployed in production applications; especially in small organizations. Firms which fail in deploying this algorithm never get the expected ROI.
Another impact of the pandemic is on the job market, where organizations are now forced to implement layoffs and furloughs. It’s a fact that even Data science professionals are also not immune to this layoff. According to a study conducted by TDWI (Transform Data with Intelligence) – a US-based Organization, it was found that about 13% of the data scientists lose their jobs because of the epidemic. It also reported that 40% of the organizations now frozen the hiring process of data science and analytics professionals. However, a silver lining is that the diminishing demand for data science professionals is not as pathetic as that of other occupations.
In contrast to this, some experts still believe that the demand for data science professionals will not affect by this pandemic. They are believing that analytics helps the companies to evaluate the performance and provides the solutions to the present situation. Data availability is abundant and so the data science experts can utilize their resources and can bring better results and thereby provide an edge during this time.
According to some studies it is estimated that the global predictive analytics market will reach $23.9 billion by 2025. This makes it evident that analytics will play a big role in the managerial decision-making process in the near future.
