[ I N - D E P T H
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D ATA
S C I E N T I S T S ]
B
eing a data scientist is the
best. That’s not just a flippant
perception, it’s literally the
‘best’ career according to a survey by
job reviewing website Glassdoor.
The research took into account
three key factors equally: earning po-
tential, job satisfaction, and the num-
ber of job openings available. With
a median salary of $110k a year, over
4,500 job vacancies in the US alone,
and the freedom to wear Converse
trainers to work – no questions asked
– it’s fair to say that data scientists
are loving life.
To be fair they deserve it. The de-
cision to step into the world of ana-
lysing data in an era of information
overload across every professional
sector was a smart one. These scien-
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Global Custodian
Spring 2018
tists are able to extrude actionable
insight from data at a time where
information is power.
Data is growing at an exponential
rate; in quantity it is set to double
every two years, with a 50-fold
growth predicted between 2010 and
2020.
In financial services alone the sta-
tistics are mind-blowing, and it is not
unusual for a large investment bank
to have between 20,000 to 30,000
servers these days. The issue is that
once you have all this data you need
to be able to use it to avoid it becom-
ing an untapped resource.
So on the one hand the six-figure
salary these data scientists are de-
manding is a reflection of their timely
and unique skill set. On the other
hand, it reflects the complete imbal-
ance between supply and demand.
The need for these skillsets is sky-
rocketing across multiple industries
far quicker than universities can
produce oven-baked data science
professionals. Research firm Gartner
said in 2012 that there would be a
shortage of 100,000 data scientists in
the US by 2020. The European Com-
mission then said in 2015 that up to
77% of data science jobs remained
unfilled at the time and predicted a
160% increase in demand between
by 2020.
According to IBM, the number of
jobs for all US data professionals will
increase by 364,000 openings to 2.7
million by 2020. Of those openings,
59% of all demand will be in finance