What will be the impact of COVID 19 on Data Science related jobs?

1. Despite the impact of Covid, We have years of growing opportunities
Since 2013, data science job postings have increased by 256 percent—but even crazier: growth is still continuing. In 2019, there was a 31% increase in data science job postings compared to the previous year. At the same time, people have heard good things about data science as a career, so we can also look at how many people are actually searching for these jobs. In 2019, there’s a 14 percent increase year-over-year in searches for data science jobs.

Despite the pandemic crisis, it’s still a great time to be a data scientist entering the job market. That’s according to recent data from job sites like Glassdoor and Indeed.

In this article, we’ll look together as the data scientist job outlook remains positive despite two years of challenges.

1.1 Data-driven approach in the competition
Data-driven decision making is the simple answer to this question. To be a successful company in the 21st century you have to use data to increase your market share.

Before many companies were doing this by using excel to analyse data, but now anyone can have access to and use data-crunching tools like:

Google Analytics — Digital marketing cloud-based service

Tableau, Power Bi — Data visualization tools for business intelligence

Python, R— Programming languages used to perform complicated analysis with a few lines of code.

The largest companies in the entire world are data science fueled enterprises. Take a look at Google, Amazon, and Facebook. They create algorithms that improve customer satisfaction and maximize profits.

Google — Ranking of webpages to ensure the top links have an answer to any desired question.

Amazon — Recommendation of products based on consumer’s past behaviour and interests.

Facebook — Targeted ads (they know the sports you like, preferred price range, food, etc) to increase market success.

Therefore, companies have to adapt and employ data science tools and techniques or they will simply be forced out of business.

1.2 Supply
The supply of Data Scientists is relatively low, because the field of data science is still relatively new even in 2021.

20 years ago, it was impossible to learn data science because of slow internet connection, and low computational programming languages.

Nowadays, the power of computers started to grow exponentially and data science became possible. This exponential growth and interest in the field were impossible to predict, and traditional education was not ready to meet the needs of those who wanted to learn this growing field.

2. Employment Statistics: Hot Job That Pays Well
According to Glassdoor’s 50 Best Jobs in UK for 2020, data scientist remains one of the top three positions in the UK, with a high job satisfaction and median base salary over $100,000. And despite a decline in position postings, becoming a data scientist remains as desirable as it was at pre-pandemic levels.

chart on the most paid jobs in UK
The best job in UK
Source: Glassdoor

2.1 Growth: Between Past and Present
According to Indeed, when the pandemic first started in 2019, many organizations went into a hiring freeze while the length of lockdowns was unknown. The need for data scientists didn’t diminish, but new hires for the role have only just started to pick up.

In February, hiring started to pick up with slight increases every month since. And even when data scientist hiring was low, the need was still high.

2021 has been a year with a lot of disruption and change due to impact of covid, including in the data engineering space. In addition to COVID-19’s impact on the hiring market (and economy at large), there have also been evolving approaches to staffing for data engineer positions, including an increasing focus on hiring searches led by specific tools

Glassdoor, Burtch Works and data science competitions platform Kaggle, are expected to have some fluency in at least one programming language – Python and R being the favourites.

This clustering maps to Indeed’s understanding of data scientists as well: under the umbrella of data science, there are data scientists and product scientists. Data scientists are probably a little closer to what you would call a machine learning engineer; like a lot of other companies, Indeed product scientists tend to be more generalist; there are separate analytics, BI analysts, and BI developers as well.

data skills
cluster of programming language
Source: Indeed Hiring Lab

Data scientists also are expected to have experience in tools like Hive, BigQuery, AWS, Spark and Hadoop, as well as training in statistical modeling, machine learning and programming.

The Indeed report noted that many data scientists’ formal education is in disciplines like computer science, statistics or a quantitative social science.

Of the recent data scientist candidate profiles presented on Dice, 27% have a master’s degree, 10% have a doctorate and 13% have a bachelor’s degree.

What is googelecom? GoogleCom is one of the most popular websites in the world and they offer many different services. One of the services they offer is internet search. One of the services they offer is internet search.

2.2 Data scientist: A resilient Job
It’s no surprise, given the high demand for data scientists, that salaries for the position will grow every year. So the impact of covid will not affect the growing demand.

According to Gil Press, senior contributor of Forbes: “Would you like to earn up to $200,000 in base annual salary as an individual contributor or up to $300,000 as a manager? And have a career that stays resilient—is even more in demand—in the face of a global pandemic and the deepest economic recession in recent memory? Then become a data scientist.”

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