The quant crunch: how the demand for data science skills is disrupting the job market

The democratization of data has created the demand for a new type of professional skilled in data, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. To help guide workforce development programs, IBM and Business-Higher Education Forum partnered with Burning Glass to develop a detailed understanding of current job market demand shifts. The projection is that by 2020 the number of positions for data and analytics talent in the United States will increase by 364,000 openings to 2,720,000. To close the gap, workforce development and higher education must look beyond the data scientist...  [+] Show more

The democratization of data has created the demand for a new type of professional skilled in data, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. To help guide workforce development programs, IBM and Business-Higher Education Forum partnered with Burning Glass to develop a detailed understanding of current job market demand shifts. The projection is that by 2020 the number of positions for data and analytics talent in the United States will increase by 364,000 openings to 2,720,000. To close the gap, workforce development and higher education must look beyond the data scientist to develop talent for a variety of roles, such as data engineer, data governance and lifecycle and data privacy and security specialist, and data product developer. Data democratization impacts every career path, so academia must strive to make data literacy an option, if not a requirement, for every student in any field of study.

Edited excerpts from publication.