Who gets hired? An outlook of the U.S. Data Scientist Job Market in 2018.

Posted on Aug 12, 2018

Take-away Message for future data scientists:

  1. Read job descriptions carefully. 
  2. Top 5 tools : Python, SQL, R, Excel and Scala.
  3. Top 5 skills: Machine Learning, Modeling, Optimization, Data Visualization, Artificial Intelligence. 
  4. Most desired degree: Master and PhD. 
  5. Most desired major: Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics and majors related to quantitative fields. 

For those who are actively looking for data scientist jobs in the U.S., the best news this month is the LinkedIn Workforce Report August 2018.  According to the report,  there is a shortage of 151,717 people with data science skills, with particularly acute shortages in New York City, San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.

To help job hunters (including me) to better understand the job market, I scraped Indeed website and collected information of 7,000 data scientist jobs around the U.S. on August 3rd. The information that I collected are: Company Name, Position Name, Location, Job Description, and Number of Reviews of the Company (Download the dataset from Kaggle). 

What Tools and Skills are desired the most?

Excel, Python and SQL turn out to be the most desired tools for data scientists where machine learning, modeling, and optimization are key skills that are mentioned the most in job descriptions. Counter intuitively, excel turns out to be the most desired tool that employers want. It has been mentioned in 83% of the job descriptions. 

Does degree matter? 

Computer Science is still the most popular major, followed by quantitative majors including Statistics, Mathematics and Economics. Surprisingly, Data Science major has only been mentioned 4 times out of 100 job descriptions on average. This might be because employers are aware of the shortage of the data science programs in the U.S.

Do employers know what type of talents they want? 

Quick answer is, not really : (

Have you gone through interviews where you are ready to be asked about Logistic Regression and Random Forest but end up whiteboard coding an algorithm problem? You'll never know if they want a data scientist or a software engineer. Exhausting. 

To address this concern, I separated all the positions into three groups: engineer, data scientist and data analyst. By comparing the job descriptions of these three groups, I would like to know if they show distinct features in job functions, degree requirement and major preference. 

Engineer vs. Data Scientist vs. Data Analyst      Tools 

This graph compares the tool frequency between these three groups. The number on each bar is the rank of the tool frequency within each group, the length of each bar represents how often this tool has been mentioned in job description for each group. The longer the bar, the more desired is this tool. For example, for data scientists, the top popular tools are python, SQL, R, Excel and Scala where programming languages are more important for engineers. Data scientists and analysts don't show significant difference in terms of the tools they use.

Engineer vs. Data Scientist vs. Data Analyst      Skills 

For skills, engineer only show preference for artificial intelligence. Data scientists show preference for skills including machine learning, modeling and statistical analysis where analyst show preference for data analysis, data visualization and research. 

Engineer vs. Data Scientist vs. Data Analyst      Degrees and Majors

In general, data scientists require a higher degree than engineer and analyst positions on average. For major preference, engineer positions show a significant preference for computer science majors where data scientists and analyst don't have a strict major requirement. Quantitative majors are generally acceptable to data scientists and analysts. 

Conclusion

From my analysis, job postings with the title "data scientists" and "analysts" have a high level overlap concerning desired tools, skills, degrees and majors. For job hunters, it is very important for you to read the job description carefully and make judgments.

Back to our question, who gets hired?

If you have a master's degree (or higher) in a quantitative field, proficient in Python, SQL, Excel, R and Scala, mastered machine learning, modeling, optimization, data visualization and artificial intelligence, and most importantly, you read job descriptions carefully, you'll be hired!

(See my codes on Github; Link to the PowerPoint)

The skills the author demonstrated here can be learned through taking Data Science with Machine Learning bootcamp with NYC Data Science Academy.

About Author

Silvia Lu

Silvia is currently working as a Data Analysis Intern at the Aviation Planning Department of Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. She also has a Psychology background and is a second-year graduate student in New York...
View all posts by Silvia Lu >

Leave a Comment

Data Scientist Job Market in the U.S. - Zdataset February 27, 2022
[…] you have no clue of where to start, check my blog for […]

View Posts by Categories


Our Recent Popular Posts


View Posts by Tags

#python #trainwithnycdsa 2019 2020 Revenue 3-points agriculture air quality airbnb airline alcohol Alex Baransky algorithm alumni Alumni Interview Alumni Reviews Alumni Spotlight alumni story Alumnus ames dataset ames housing dataset apartment rent API Application artist aws bank loans beautiful soup Best Bootcamp Best Data Science 2019 Best Data Science Bootcamp Best Data Science Bootcamp 2020 Best Ranked Big Data Book Launch Book-Signing bootcamp Bootcamp Alumni Bootcamp Prep boston safety Bundles cake recipe California Cancer Research capstone car price Career Career Day citibike classic cars classpass clustering Coding Course Demo Course Report covid 19 credit credit card crime frequency crops D3.js data data analysis Data Analyst data analytics data for tripadvisor reviews data science Data Science Academy Data Science Bootcamp Data science jobs Data Science Reviews Data Scientist Data Scientist Jobs data visualization database Deep Learning Demo Day Discount disney dplyr drug data e-commerce economy employee employee burnout employer networking environment feature engineering Finance Financial Data Science fitness studio Flask flight delay gbm Get Hired ggplot2 googleVis H20 Hadoop hallmark holiday movie happiness healthcare frauds higgs boson Hiring hiring partner events Hiring Partners hotels housing housing data housing predictions housing price hy-vee Income Industry Experts Injuries Instructor Blog Instructor Interview insurance italki Job Job Placement Jobs Jon Krohn JP Morgan Chase Kaggle Kickstarter las vegas airport lasso regression Lead Data Scienctist Lead Data Scientist leaflet league linear regression Logistic Regression machine learning Maps market matplotlib Medical Research Meet the team meetup methal health miami beach movie music Napoli NBA netflix Networking neural network Neural networks New Courses NHL nlp NYC NYC Data Science nyc data science academy NYC Open Data nyc property NYCDSA NYCDSA Alumni Online Online Bootcamp Online Training Open Data painter pandas Part-time performance phoenix pollutants Portfolio Development precision measurement prediction Prework Programming public safety PwC python Python Data Analysis python machine learning python scrapy python web scraping python webscraping Python Workshop R R Data Analysis R language R Programming R Shiny r studio R Visualization R Workshop R-bloggers random forest Ranking recommendation recommendation system regression Remote remote data science bootcamp Scrapy scrapy visualization seaborn seafood type Selenium sentiment analysis sentiment classification Shiny Shiny Dashboard Spark Special Special Summer Sports statistics streaming Student Interview Student Showcase SVM Switchup Tableau teachers team team performance TensorFlow Testimonial tf-idf Top Data Science Bootcamp Top manufacturing companies Transfers tweets twitter videos visualization wallstreet wallstreetbets web scraping Weekend Course What to expect whiskey whiskeyadvocate wildfire word cloud word2vec XGBoost yelp youtube trending ZORI