Why should students choose a career in big data? Big data will only get bigger, both for businesses and the platform providers that enable big data. This inevitably means more jobs and more demand for skills such as the knowledge of programming languages behind the tools.
Given the vastness of the field of big data, two major questions arise:
- Where are these jobs now?
- Where are they going to be in the near future?
Forbes gives a breakdown of the significant growth of big data jobs [1]. As shown in Figure 1, companies are becoming reliant on big data in many different ways.
Top Ten Big Data Employers, December, 2014
| Employer | Distribution of Jobs Available By Employer (9/1/14 – 12/29/14) | Number of new Jobs Added Over the Last Year By Employer Requiring Big Data-related skills |
| Cisco | 5.70% | 3,613 |
| IBM | 5.30% | (524) |
| Oracle Corporation | 3.60% | 2,264 |
| Intuit Inc. | 3.40% | (239) |
| Amazon | 1.90% | 293 |
| EMC Corporation | 1.80% | 255 |
| CRGT Inc. | 1.80% | 1,160 |
| Teradata | 1.70% | 794 |
| Sabre | 1.60% | 1,038 |
| Noblis | 1.40% | 901 |
Figure 1: Top ten data employers by December 2014 [1]
It’s noteworthy that there is large growth of big data-related skills in Intuit Inc. (finances and taxes), Sabre (a technology company focused on travel), and Noblis, a nonprofit that deals with contracting for Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) mission success and other national security strategies.
Based on this information and regardless of a student’s path of choice, there are two strong reasons to enter the field of big data.
2.2.1 Necessity
First, the amount of data being created on a daily basis is increasing constantly and if there is no one to analyze them, the data becomes useless [2]. In other words, big data professionals are becoming increasingly essential. As a result, companies are searching for individuals that have experience with big data, resulting in job security and availability for those professionals [2]. For example, a study conducted by the McKinsey Global Institute states that there will be a major shortage of big data professionals and that by the year 2018, there will be a shortage of 190,000 data scientists and 1.5 million analysts [2]. Figure 2 provided by Indeed.com, a job search engine, depicts the job growth rate in big data [3].
Figure 2: Big data and data science trends by 2015 [3]
2.2.2 Variety
Second, the variety of big data positions is as large as the name of the field suggests. Some of the job titles available include: big data engineer, data scientist, data engineer, business analytics specialist, business intelligence (BI) solution architect, just to name a few. The wide variety of the big data field is a very appealing attribute. As you can clearly see in Figure 3 there are many different industries in which big data plays a role.
Figure 3: Major industries hiring big data expertise [1]