The Data Science Job Market in 2021

everybody knows that 2020 was a pretty tough year but to add to that there are rumblings now that data scientist is no longer the number one job in america so let's sit down and talk about what exactly is the state of the data science job market in the year 2021 [Music] hello again guys and welcome back to my channel if this is your first time here my name is richard and this is richard on data the channel where i help you break into data science and grow your skills in the field so glassdoor did a survey recently and it looks like data scientist has indeed fallen from the number one spot based on factors like median base salary job satisfaction and job openings it's sitting at number two behind java developer and i get questions on here all the time about whether or not it makes sense to get into the field now given general fears about it and data analytics in general getting automated in the future so in this video there's a few different things that i'm going to try to break down for you number one is what the overall demand out there is looking like for data scientists number two is a little bit more difficult to pin down but we're going to try to look at what the overall supply of data scientists out there is expected to look like with the general understanding that as long as demand for data scientists exceed supply you're going to have an easier time getting a job and your salary is going to be higher i'm going to talk about trends that i expect that we're going to see in the recovering years following 2020 and then we're going to close with pretty much the most fun topic imaginable which is of course salaries before i do that take a moment to subscribe to my channel if you haven't already hit the notification bell so you never miss an update and then smash the like button for the youtube algorithm and then if you guys would be willing to support my channel i will have links in the description of this video to my paypal account as well as to crypto wallet addresses your support is highly appreciated alright so let's start with the demand side of the equation and i will say overall it looks pretty healthy though there are some slightly conflicting reports to start with this is from a report that was done by dice following q2 of 2020 but they found that the demand for data scientists in 2020 increased by an average of 50 percent across healthcare telecommunications media and entertainment and the banking financial services and insurance sectors now i'm not necessarily familiar with the ins and outs of all of those different industries but i know for sure that we're in a world where healthcare is going increasingly digital and that last year telecom absolutely boomed all of that to say is that if an industry is growing as a whole there's a pretty good chance that data science is going to flourish there but there's more in the way of good news now not all of these statistics were necessarily up to date following the full impacts of the pandemic but there is some seriously good speculation from reputable sources so a report from the royal society that's an independent scientific academy of the uk and the commonwealth said that the demand for workers with data skills grew by 231 percent over the past five years then ibm projected that globally around 28 of the total jobs in 2021 would be data science jobs and the u.s bureau of labor statistics believes these jobs will grow by at least 19 by 2026 so that's all very good stuff even the fact that there's this much hype and positive speculation going on can lead to organizations feeling left out or like they'd miss the boat if they're not getting into data science this in turn is going to lead to the creation of more jobs even if with some of those jobs you might have to be kind of careful because they're not necessarily the most desirable types of data science jobs however i would be doing a disservice to all of you if i communicated that everything everywhere was all sunshine and roses j fang that's a silicon valley data scientist who runs the youtube channel data science j as well as the interview prep newsletter interview query did some research into this and the picture that he found was a little bit different he looked at over 10 000 data science related interview experiences and he found that growth in data science interviews actually slowed down in 2020 at a 10 growth rate compared to a previous growth rate closer to 80 percent that's not true necessarily of fang companies though and it's not true of data engineering either where there was a 40 increase so to be fair he still found that data science interviews and jobs in general were experiencing growth but at the same time this seems like a much different story from some of the other stats out there so how do we reconcile these things i don't know this for sure but i do think there's a little bit of a tech focus with the sample he was working with so this might not necessarily speak to what's going on in other sectors in things like healthcare or the financial services industry there's also some maturation happening both in and outside of tech where they either have a bigger push towards data or machine learning engineering or they just call the same sort of thing something different altogether such as research scientists we can see the growth there though still looks very impressive that's always something you have to take into account with these types of analyses because some people stratify it a lot further and they look at all the various different types of data jobs whereas some people just focus on jobs with the title data scientist and it's certainly also possible in the short term that companies had to take a bit more of a defensive posture whereas before they might have been more eager to invest in data science last year maybe there was more fiscal uncertainty so a little bit less hiring though again that is more of a short-term rather than a long-term sort of dynamic all in all though we live in an era where last year even the top tech companies experience massive growth in their market capitalization and there's nothing from a long-term fundamental sense that i can find out there that's super scary demand for data science overall looks extremely healthy to me and while there's no question that yes it is going to undergo some changes in the near term the job market for it i think is going to continue to grow but obviously it's not enough just to talk about the demand side we need to talk about the supply side too that is how many people out there are trying to get into data science besides probably you based on the fact that you're watching this video so for this i think one of the best first places to look is the number of degree programs out there from universities because it is well known that most data scientists have college degrees and according to data scienceprograms.org there are more than 830 separate data science programs out there being offered from around 500 universities around the world so first of all unfortunately i couldn't find any charting out there on how much exactly this has grown over the last few years but i do think it's fair to assume more universities out there are catching on to the fact that there's more demand for data science out in industry and they're going to accommodate by creating more and more types of data science programs plus let's just put this into perspective it may seem like a lot that there are 500 universities out there offering data science programs but keep in mind that there are 25 000 universities or so around the world so this is only somewhere around two percent of universities and yes i understand it's possible to become a data scientist with a degree like cs or statistics like i did in fact it's possible to become a data scientist with no college degree whatsoever but i do hope this helps ground you in the fact it's very difficult for supply of data scientists to keep up with the growing demand i couldn't find statistic up to date following the impacts of the pandemic but at least as of early last year data science jobs were staying open five days longer on average compared to other jobs meaning they were harder to fail with fewer qualified people out there all right so now that we've covered the actual market supply and demand side of things let's talk about trends that we can probably expect to see in 2021 and in future years now there's a wonderful blog article in kd nuggets that i think did a great job of breaking some of the most important things down so they list four different things here and i think all of these make a lot of sense first thing they list is the rise of decision intelligence which in this context basically means artificial intelligence this is the trend most people are familiar with and although it's only a piece of the big puzzle that is data science there's no question ai and machine learning are huge and they're only going to grow next is data stories now they make a distinction between these and dashboards framing these as stories that take the viewers on a journey of the data and easily explain all the conclusions that are available from the analysis adding that the users don't need any detailed technical knowledge to understand these stories now speaking personally on this one i've seen these before in the data science context but not nearly enough so this one actually kind of surprised me next trend is the increase of cloud services and there's no question that over the last year a number of organizations developed their cloud infrastructure so yeah there's also no question this is going to represent an increasingly important domain and skill set for data scientists in the future and then lastly there's branching of data analytics specifically they mention audio video text customer feedback style data just to give some examples a lot of newer people tend to think of data as this structured sort of thing or you have tables with rows and columns but it doesn't always start that way you have all this unstructured stuff in the universe out there which is super useful too obviously particularly if you're just breaking into data science for the first time there's no way you can be reasonably expected to have expertise in all of this stuff but even knowing that some of these things represent emerging trends can set you apart from others and help you have the right types of conversations if i were to try to summarize these things as succinctly as possible again based on that article as well as my own anecdotal experience it would be to speculate that large unstructured data is going to play an increasingly important role in the future for that reason and for others things like natural language processing and cloud technologies are going to become increasingly important components of a data science background as well and then as far as machine learning and ai those are no fad either now let's close this video on a fun note which is by of course talking about money and obviously salaries are pretty challenging to provide a concise story about because they vary so much by years of experience and geographical location one surprisingly good resource for understanding data science salaries out there is actually the salary mega thread on the data science subreddit obviously this is far from any kind of scientific sampling but you see people on here from different countries different regions of the united states different levels of experience and even variations on job title but as we saw at the beginning of this video from glassdoor here in the united states anyway the average salary for a data scientist role is a hundred and thirteen thousand seven thirty and that's not taking into account things like title changes so for instance say if you get promoted from a data scientist to a senior data scientist you're going to be swimming in the big bucks even more obviously this whole discussion we've been having in this video about supply and demand affects prices extensively because if there is a high demand for something for which there is a limited supply the price of that thing aka your salary must go up based on all available evidence demand is going to significantly outpace supply at least in the near term so at this point anyway i think the future for salaries looks absolutely fantastic so overall just to summarize everything that we've talked about here i really do think the trend is your friend until the end when it bends data science will definitely not look the same a few years from now especially as emerging trends mature and platforms like automl become more mainstream which is going to allow data scientists to do more better different things i'll put out a video soon on the trends surrounding data engineering and i also did a video around a year ago where i discussed the notion of data science becoming automated and why i think that's overblown i'll have a link to that in the description but overall data science has been an amazing trend for years and yes 2020 was a pretty rough year but i don't see it as being bad enough to where it's fundamentally going to change that trend data science remains lucrative and as economies around the world grow and continue to open up in the coming years i think it's only going to become even more lucrative so thanks for watching this video tell me in the comments what you think do you agree with me do you disagree with me then also smash the like button and i'll see you all in the not so distant future until then richard on data

Channel: RichardOnData

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Keywords: data science job market, data science jobs, job market for data science, data science jobs in usa, data science jobs in india, 365 data science, data science interview questions, job market after covid, job market 2021, data science job market after covid, data science job market 2021, data science 2021, data science career 2021, kdnuggets, data scientist career, data scientist salary, is data science a rising career, does data science have a future, data scientist job outlook

Id: 22dEJsSlTs4

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021