LinkedIn produced a 2020 Search and Staffing U.S. Emerging Jobs Report recently. They came up with some interesting findings from looking at the last five years of Linkedin.com members with full time positions within the U.S. They were able to calculate the compound annual growth rate of each job and rank the top 15.
Fifty percent of these emerging jobs are made up of roles related to engineering or development. Not a big surprise. As recruiters in the field of Data Science and Analytics we were most interested in the three highlighted positions above, Artificial Intelligence, Data Scientist and Data Engineer.
Artificial Intelligence, with a growth rate almost double the next job on the list, is really a renamed machine learning title. Machine learning is an application within artificial intelligence and it seems that knowledge has caught up with job titling. Under either title, demand for candidates with on-the-job experience in both areas as well as natural language processing (NLP) is booming. LinkedIn lists machine learning, deep learning, TensorFlow, Python and NLP as necessary skills for this job.
Interestingly two of those five skills, machine learning and Python, are in the #3 job title skills with the most compound annual growth, Data Scientist. In many ways these two job titles, Artificial Intelligence and Data Scientist, are one in the same. It is true that you can be a data scientist and not have artificial intelligence skills, although that more advanced skill set will become the norm within the next year or two.
Openings for data scientists and artificial intelligence experts have expanded beyond the big cities of New York, San Francisco, LA and Boston to include secondary cities like Pittsburgh, Portland and Charlotte. Tech has taken over DC in the number of positions in data science and artificial intelligence, along with cybersecurity positions. (#10 on the ermeging jobs report.) While many of these jobs in DC are tied to government hiring, in our recruiting efforts we are seeing a number of small firms doing sophisticated, focused analysis in need of data science skills. It might be government related on some projects but you are NOT a government employee.
The Data Engineer position, with compound annual growth of 33%, presents some interesting challenges. Data Analyst and data engineer are great access positions to develop your skills to become a data scientist. We see many, many data engineers unwilling to take another data engineering job at another company because they want to move into the data science role. Companies are unwilling to promote data engineers into data scientist roles for two reasons: they need additional training to do the role and replacing their data engineering role is very difficult. It’s a little bit of the chicken or the egg problem. Data engineering skills are sorely needed for any data science work to succeed. Additionally, since there isn’t much of a hierarchy to the data engineer career path, it is almost built for dissatisfaction at the 3-5 year point.
