by Angela Guess

According to a new press release, “A new study, The State of Data Engineering released today by Stitch, an ETL service; and Galvanize, a learning community for technology, reveals a shortage in data engineering talent. There are only 6,500 self-reported data engineers on LinkedIn, but the San Francisco Bay area alone has 6,600 job listings for that same title. ‘Companies are increasingly viewing data as a competitive advantage,’ said Jake Stein, CEO of Stitch. ‘The Ubers and Airbnbs of tech have mastered using data to build better and smarter technology products. Now other tech companies are looking to do the same, and this is causing a major talent shortage’.”

The release goes on, “The report delves deep into three core trends around data engineering: (1) Growth in the data engineering discipline. While there’s a shortage of this talent today, the numbers of data engineers are growing rapidly. From 2013-2015, the number of data engineers increased 122%. For context, the number of data scientists increased 47% in that same time period… (2) Where data engineers are coming from. 42% of all data engineers were formerly working as a software engineer, making it above and beyond the most common background. Data engineers are coming from other disciplines as well, but in much smaller numbers. A few other backgrounds include analyst (7%), consultant (6%), business analyst (3%), and data architect (3%).”

Read more at Marketwired.

Photo credit: Stitch