San Francisco. Image from http://mcmanuslab.ucsf.edu/SFCorporate data stores are growing exponentially, nearly every tech vendor is positioning their products to help handle the influx of data, and IT departments are scrambling to find the right people to collect, analyze and interpret data in a way that’s meaningful to the business. On the employment front, the big data deluge is creating a hiring boom across North America. Modis, an IT staffing firm, identified five cities in particular where big data is driving job growth.

San Francisco tops the Modis list, followed by McLean, Va., Boston, St. Louis and Toronto. The roles that companies in these cities are fighting to fill include data scientist, data analyst, business intelligence professional and data modeling/data modeler.

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Business intelligence and data analysis have been core enterprise disciplines for a long time, but they’re becoming more important to businesses as data volumes rise, says Laura Kelley, a Modis vice president in Houston. “We’re in a new era in terms of how large the databases are, the amount of data we’re collecting, and how we’re using it. It’s much more strategic than it’s ever been.”

Big data professionals can be particularly difficult to find since many roles require a complicated blend of business, analytic, statistical and computer skills — which is not something a candidate acquires overnight. In addition, “clients are looking for people with a certain level of experience, who have worked in a big data environment. There aren’t a lot of them in the market,” Kelley says.

Looking at recruiting trends across its offices, Modis finds there’s not one industry that’s doing the most big-data hiring. Rather, the cities have in common a concentration of large enterprises across myriad industries.

San Francisco, for instance, is home to large companies in the retail, insurance, healthcare, and e-commerce sectors.

McLean, Va., has both a strong commercial sector and government presence. “There are many data center operations in this area, both commercial and government related, that require talent to support the high volume of that data,” Modis explains in its report. “In addition, there is no larger consumer of IT products and services in the world than the US federal government.”

St. Louis. Image from http://www.slu.eduBanking and bio/pharmaceutical industries helped put Boston on the big data hiring map. “Both industries deal with large amounts of data that are detailed and complex in nature. That data then needs to be analyzed and placed in reports, dashboards and spreadsheets by data scientist and analysts,” Modis writes.

In St. Louis, universities and healthcare companies lead the big data hiring boom, followed by pharmaceutical and bioresearch firms that need to fill data analyst and scientist roles.

Lastly, in Toronto, financial institutions are fueling a need for business intelligence pros who can help organizations get a more precise and complete picture of the business and customers, Modis finds.

In the big picture, companies often have to compromise and prioritize their wish list — technical expertise, industry experience or quantitative statistical analysis skills, for experience — to find available big-data candidates.

Toronto. Image from http://www.parkmoteltoronto.com/“What is this person going to be doing? Do you need the technical skills? Or is the quantitative/statistical expertise more important? Is this person going to be doing data modeling or making business decisions?” Kelley says. “In an ideal world, companies want all of it. But it’s not an ideal world.”

Ann Bednarz covers IT careers, outsourcing and Internet culture for Network World. Follow Ann on Twitter at @annbednarz and check out her blog, Occupational Hazards. Her e-mail address is abednarz@nww.com.

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World’s Infrastructure Management section.

Article source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/260772/top_5_cities_for_big_data_jobs.html

The data scientist is a mystical spirit. A wizard, whose skills are fired in the deep unknown of a developer’s lair. Their secrets are worth the gold of a million empires.They possess the keys to eternity.They have pet dragons.

Not! It’s time to take away the staff and stop thinking of data scientists as lord wizards of middle earth lore.

The reality is something much different as business intelligence provider SiSense found in a study it recently commissioned about the state of the data professional market.

It’s important to consider the source with commissioned surveys. Obviously, SiSense has an interest in providing business intelligence solutions to companies. But the survey they funded does have findings that provides insights into the data professional market.

It’s true that data scientists are highly sought after. And there are more people who want to have the job. What companies need to do better is look at the overall data professional market. By doing that they may find that the person they seek is not necessarily a developer with pure technical skills.  More so it may be someone who has a mix of business skills with an understanding of big data and the applications needed to realize the right findings and overall return for the company.

It’s also not like we have an exact definition of a data scientist. The title is used quite freely. But you do need to know that if you seek out a data scientist, be prepared in knowing that you are hiring someone who will likely be in high demand.

For data professionals, the SiSense survey found that salaries start at $55,000. The highest paid are the data analysts who have become vice presidents in the organizations where they work. They earn as much as $132,000 per year. On average, the vice presidents of data analytics have spent about nine years with their employer. Salaries jump as much as 40% as these people reach the nine-year mark.

According to the survey, data scientists earn on average about $90,000 per year.  But a pattern is  emerging that may pose issues for companies that seek these people out.

Data scientists have become so hyped that everyone wants one.  Trend data from Indeed.com shows the increases in job postings that have the title of data scientist.

Overall, salaries are going up for data professionals. In the survey, 61% of respondents said their salaries were up in 2012 compared to last year. And next year, 78% of those surveyed said that they expect their salaries to increase.

Job security is not a chief concern, especially for the data scientist.

The results also show that people with business skills are sought after.

I think this last data point shows why employers need to think more about who they want to hire. Data scientists are very important to companies that deal with web scale data. I am talking about companies such as eBay or Facebook. But most companies need people who can help solve business problems with data that is minuscule in comparison to the big, web properties.

Finding that right data professional does not have to be a magical quest. It often means finding people with the right mix of skills who love the mysteries of what data beholds and the business acumen to discover its meaning.

(Lead image courtesy of Arthur Buxton, a talented artist who makes beautiful data visualizations.)

• SISENSE

Today’s enterprise business intelligence is a heavy and expensive project that requires a ton of IT support. Our product, Prism, enables immediate deployment and connects to any data source, dynamically. In doing that, it frees IT from the need to maintain and build data warehouses, OLAP cubes, and refresh reports. It also frees users to use any business intelligence methodology, reports and charts, to bring more common sense and provide them with uncommon insights.

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Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/12/why-the-search-for-the-mystical-data-scientist-should-not-be-a-feat-of-magic/