50,000 posts in data science vacant in India: Report

​New Delhi: As India pushes its boundaries towards achieving digital growth, a new report said on Tuesday that over 50,000 positions in the fields of data science and Machine Learning (ML) are vacant in the country owing to a lack of skilled workforce.A state of the industry report by leading ed-tech platform Great Learning found that despite the number of job postings and job seeker interest for data scientist reaching an all-time high in 2017, there are no skilled professionals around. 

"The job market in this space is heavily tilted towards job seekers, with twice the number of jobs than available talent," said the report based on a study of 28,000 participants across 3,000 organisations in the country. "With more and more jobs increasingly becoming data driven, the need of the hour is for professionals to upskill themselves to stay relevant," said Hari Krishnan Nair, Co-founder, Great Learning. 

"Over the past one year, we have seen heightened interest from companies across IT, BFSI and telecom for professionals in data science," he added. 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.

According to Gartner, out of 10 lakh registered companies in India, 75 per cent have invested or are going to invest in ML 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 per cent of jobs in the domain. 

According to the report, skills in Cloud, Big Data Analytics, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are going to be critical for data science professionals to grab the available jobs. A similar study last year by online analytics training institute Edvancer found that nearly 50,000 job vacancies related to analytics are currently available in India.