'More Than 50,000 Data Science And Machine Learning Jobs Are Vacant In India'

More than 50,000 jobs in the Data Science and Machine Learning are lying vacant in India, for lack skilled professionals, according to an ed-tech platform, Great Learning. 

The number of vacant jobs is despite the fact that the demand for Data Science professionals in India is rapidly growing, and the number of job postings and job seeker interest for ‘Data Scientist’ had reached an all-time high in 2017. This seems to be the only sector abundant with jobs where the jobs are almost double top the number of job seekers.

According to Gartner, out of 10 lakh registered companies in India, 75 percent have invested or are going to invest in Machine Learning and Data Science. When it comes to the demand for professionals in this space, banking and financial services lead the pack having created almost 44 percent of jobs in the domain. E-commerce has also emerged as a large market for Data Science professionals having created 12 percent of all analytics jobs in 2017. Healthcare (12 percent), energy (8 percent), telecom (6 percent) and media (6 percent) along with others like retail, automobile and travel are the other sectors powering the demand for data science professionals.

According to the report, skills in Cloud, Big Data Analytics, Machine Learning and AI are going to be critical for data science professionals to land the available jobs. When it comes to tools, while the highest number of job searches are observed in SQL programming language, Python is the fastest growing, owing to the greater support of Machine Learning libraries. Data Scientist, Data Analyst, Data Architect, Data Statistician, ML engineer, ML specialist, Technical Architect, Data Engineer are some of the most popular roles available.

The report also analyses the growing scope of data science in non-traditional sectors like agriculture, aviation, healthcare, genomics research and robotics. By 2020, below Data Science jobs will be created in India in these sectors:

Hari Krishnan Nair, Co-founder, Great Learning said, “India lacks massively when it comes to talent in Data Science, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. With more and more jobs increasingly becoming data-driven, the need of the hour is for professionals to upskill themselves to stay relevant. Over the past one year, we have seen heightened interest from companies across IT, BFSI and telecom for professionals in data science. Companies like Edelweiss, Verizon and TCS have recruited several students from Great Learning for various roles in Machine Learning and Data Science, in the last six months.”

Rajguru Tandon

BW Reporters The author is a correspondent with BW Businessworld with keen interest in HR and employee welfare.