by Angela Guess
Alex Woodie recently wrote in Datanami, “If your company is looking to hire data scientist right now, good luck. Five years after Harvard Business Review first shone the spotlight on the data scientist shortage, the gap between data science supply and demand remains substantial. In fact, the gap may be getting bigger. How big is the data science skills gap? There are several ways to attack that problem, and a number of smart people at renowned organizations have attempted to put numbers to the problem.”
Woodie goes on, “Back in 2012, the research firm Gartner said there would be a shortage of 100,000 data scientists in the United States by 2020. A year earlier, McKinsey put the national gap in data scents and others with deep analytical expertise at 140,000 to 190,000 people by 2017, resulting in demand that’s 60 percent greater than supply. In 2014, the consulting firm Accenture found that more than 90 percent of its clients planned to hire people with data science expertise, but more than 40 percent cited a lack of talent as the number one problem.”
Woodie continues, “Compensation is another way to track the skills shortage. In O’Reilly’s 2015 Data Science Salary Survey, data scientists in the United States earned a base median salary of $104,000, while a Glassdoor survey found the national median to be about $113,000, nearly double the median for a regular programmer. However, if you’re working in a metro area, such as New York City or Silicon Valley, the starting salary for a data scientist can exceed $200,000, a Stanford University director recently told Bloomberg.”
Photo credit: Flickr