Data science is the next big thing in the field of Artificial Intelligence. It has evolved as the most promising and in-demand career path for skilled professionals. As the amount of data has grown over the years, so has the need for professionals who can extract meaning from and interpret data.
“The ability to take data — to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it — that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades.” - Hal Varian, chief economist at Google and UC Berkeley professor of Information Sciences, Business, and Economics.
In this article, we will discuss a Data Scientist's salary around the globe and understand why becoming a Data Scientist is the 'sexiest job title of the 21st century'.
What's included:
What does a Data Scientist do?
- Data Scientists lay a solid data foundation for their organizations to perform robust analytics. This requires extensive use of tools and methods from statistics and machine learning, which helps them to achieve sustainable growth.
- They build machine learning pipelines and personalized data products to make better data-driven decisions for their organization and customers.
The ever-evolving Data Scientist trend
IBM published a study, wherein it predicts that the demand for Data Scientists will soar by 28% in 2021. The demand for Data Scientists has been on a steady upslope. Some of the important points from the aforementioned IBM study are summarised below.
- 59% of all Data Science and Analytics (DSA) job demand can be found in Finance and Insurance, Professional Services, and IT.
- Data Scientist job roles remain open an average of 45 days, five days longer than the market average.
- Annual demand for the fast-growing new roles of Data Scientists, Data Developers, and Data Engineers will approximately reach 700,000 openings by 2021.
As the world is moving towards making better data-driven decisions, both startups and major corporations like Cisco, Dell, IBM, VMWare, etc are offering lucrative salaries to Data Scientists.
Data Scientist Salary
The average annual salaries for Data Scientists can vary over countries, with the highest annual salaries seen in the United States, Australia, Israel and Canada and the lowest seen in Poland, Ukraine, India, and Russia. Please note that while some countries may have low annual salaries, it does not always indicate that their Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers report low job satisfaction compared to countries with higher annual salaries.
According to Payscale.com, the average annual salary of a Data scientist in India is Rs 708,012 ($9905 ) , while that in the United States is $96,106.
Skills required for a Data Scientist
The highest demand for Data Science skills is in the field of Machine Learning, which is growing at a rate of 9.8x, while the traditional Data Scientist role is growing at the rate of 6.5x.
On a daily basis, a Data Scientist may do the following:
- Design, define and implement important metrics for the project.
- Run and interpret experiments.
- Create dynamic and/or static data dashboards.
- Generate recommendations from modeling and measurement.
- Create optimization functions and deploy functions to production systems.
For Data Scientists to complete the above tasks successfully, they should have the following skills.
Expert technical proficiency with Python, R, and SQL
One of the most important skills for a Data Scientist to possess is the proficiency in either Python or R and a good knowledge of SQL. R is preferred when a lot of statistical modelling and research is to be conducted. Python is the preferred language when it comes to deep learning research.
Collect, Clean and Organize data
Data Scientists spend 79% of their time to collect, clean and organize data. These important analytical skills take up the majority of their time and are the most essential. In addition, they may also be involved in mining data, refining algorithms or building training sets.
Other Analytical Skills
The most lucrative analytics skills for Data Scientists to possess include MapReduce, Apache Pig, Machine Learning, Apache Hive, and Apache Hadoop. DAS professionals with MapReduce skills are earning $115,907 a year on average, making this the most in-demand skill. DAS professionals with expertise in Apache Pig, Hive and Hadoop are competing for jobs paying over $100K.
In addition to this, Data Scientists are required to possess sharp business acumen, scientific curiosity, and strong leadership and communication skills. Having them will greatly affect the salary scale.
🌟 Extra Resources 🌟
💡 Pro-Tip: Download our Data Scientist Salary infograph.
Are you hiring Data Scientists for your organization? Don't know how to assess them? Check out our Data Science and Analytics Test and Python Coding Test (Basic) for hiring entry-level Data Scientists for your team.
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Keerthi Rangan
Keerthi is a Content Marketing Strategist at Adaface.
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