India to witness 1.5 lakh openings for data scientists in 2020

New Delhi: India is set to witness 1.5 lakh new openings for data scientists this year -- a whopping 62 per cent increase from 2019 which would be led by the BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), manufacturing, healthcare, IT and e-commerce, a new report said on Monday.

Currently, 70 per cent of job postings are for data scientists with less than five years of work experience and data science professionals, in a separate survey, revealed that the BFSI sector offers the highest average salary to them.

The average salary of data science professionals in the BFSI sector was 13.56 lakh per annum, followed by manufacturing at 11.8 lakh per annum and healthcare, also at 11.8 lakh per annum last year, said the report prepared by the ed-tech company Great Learning.

"With vast quantities of data being generated, the data science vertical is key to mining actionable insights for businesses. These have resulted in professionals acknowledging the scope of this field, and are working towards upgrading skills to meet the demand. 2020 is set to be a big year for data science in India," said Hari Krishnan Nair, Co-founder, Great Learning.

The data science sector has been reeling with a massive shortage of skilled talent in the country. In 2019, close to 97,000 positions related to analytics and data were vacant owing to the dearth of qualified talent.

While there has been an increase in the number of professionals upskilling in data science, job growth has outpaced this number, leading to lucrative career opportunities.

"While the current analytics talent, especially at senior levels, have migrated from IT, the next generation will be expected to have specialized skills in data across all prominent industries making upskilling mandatory for a role in the new economy," said the report.

Currently, there are four unique career paths that have emerged in the country, with entry-level roles being data scientist, data analyst, data engineer and business intelligence developer.

The survey was conducted among working professionals in the data science domain with 46 per cent of respondents being executives, 17 per cent managers, and senior managers (8 per cent), among others.