From the course: Data Science Foundations: Fundamentals

Supply and demand for data science

From the course: Data Science Foundations: Fundamentals

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Supply and demand for data science

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- [Instructor] Now I know that we're all supposed to be happy just being who we are, but sometimes it's nice to have some external validation, and it's also nice to get paid. And that brings up a curious statement from 2012 that appeared in Harvard Business Review. In a groundbreaking article, Thomas Davenport and D. J. Patil made the extraordinary claim that data science, of all things, was the sexiest job of the 21st century. Now, it's a shocking thing to say, but they had some good reasons for saying this. They argued primarily that one, data scientists had a valuable combination of rare qualities that, two, put them in a high demand. So let's take a look at each of those things. So the rare qualities, what is special about data scientists that would make it such a amazing job? Well, they find order, meaning, and value in unstructured data. If you think about the text from social media, that's unstructured, doesn't go into rows and columns. If you think about just this nightmare deluge of data coming from so many different sources, data scientists are able to find some meaning in that. Also, they specialize in predicting outcomes, building predictive models. They're also able to automate really cumbersome processes to make a business run more efficiently. So those are some very rare and valuable qualities. And then in terms of high demand, what's going on here is, because data science can provide hidden insight, it's able to provide a competitive advantage and every business wants that. And while traditionally it's the tech industry, the thing to know is it's not just the tech industry, it's healthcare, telecommunications, energy, banking, financial services and insurance, retail, media and entertainment, construction, education, manufacturing, cybersecurity, transportation and government, and nonprofit organizations, among others. Really what's happening is there is a spread of the value and the demand for data science, which originated in the tech industry, think people hiring for Google searches or Facebook recommendation engines, but the value is being seen everywhere. And as the process becomes broader, more and more companies in more and more sectors are able to see and pursue the value in data science. So to give you a little bit of data on data science, a January 2019 report from Indeed found growth in job ads. They said that they had a 29% increase in job ads for data science over one year, and 344%, that's three and a half times as many over six years. Then there's also a growth in job searches. So this is people looking for jobs in data science, and it does grow, but the same article by Indeed found only 14% growth over one year. So just put those two things together. There is a gap in supply and demand. A 29% increase in demand over one year, but only a 14% growth in supply. That gap in supply and demand is what makes it a very good time to go into data science. Part of this shows up in the salary for data science. So for instance, the average salary, base salary, by the way, for data science, according to Glassdoor in 2021 is $117,000 a year. By the way, compare that to the national personal income median of 51,000, that's over twice as much. And what that lets you know is, yeah, this is a good job to have. Glassdoor has listed data science as the number one job in the US for four consecutive years from 2016 to 2019, and still in the top three, even as it spreads over, it's an amazingly rewarding and productive field. And that is what led Harvard Business Review to call it the sexiest job of the 21st century.

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