Big Data Jobs in Hyper-Growth

The mind-boggling growth of data is creating tremendous opportunities for organizations to benefit from in any number of ways. Coinciding with the explosion of data is a surge in job openings for people with the right combination of big data skills, particularly in the field of marketing.

A quick search for “big data” on any of the major Internet job boards will generate thousands of hits for a variety of job openings. The hit list includes lots of traditional IT-focused jobs titles, like big data architect, data analytics engineer, and Hadoop developer, reflecting the upwelling of demand for people who can design and build big data systems and applications.

But there’s also a surge in openings for big data jobs outside of the traditional IT sphere, including jobs such as product marketing manager, account manager, and pre-sales consultants. Demand for individuals who are comfortable working with big data sets and putting internally and externally sourced data to profitable use.

According to Forbes’ MarketShare blog, the number of job openings that list “big data” as a job requirement has increased by 63 percent over the past year, demonstrating broad-based growth in demand for big data skills. But in the specific field of marketing, the number of new jobs that require big data analytic skills has increased by 67 percent over the past year, and has gone up 136 percent over the past three years, Forbes says.

As the explosion of big data job openings resonates across the job market, employers are finding that the term “big data” just doesn’t cut it anymore. In response, employers and recruiters are getting more specific in the types of big data skills they’re seeking.

In its analysis of marketing-related job openings in July, Forbes found 23,118 jobs that listed one or more of the following requirements: marketing analytics, advanced analytics, marketing mix modeling, media mix modeling, and digital attribution.

This diversification of big data-related jobs is on display on the Big Data Jobs Index, which the folks at www.icrunchdata.com recently posted to their website. The index shows about a half-million big data jobs in various fields, including analytics, business intelligence, data science, software development, statistics, and the catchall “big data.”

Big data is creating millions of jobs out of whole cloth. By some counts, big data will have generated 4.4 million technology jobs around the world by 2015, with 1.9 million of those jobs being created in the U.S. Forbes quotes icrunchdata’s Todd Nevins as calling big data “one of the most hyper-growth niches of employment in a century.”

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