A2 Radio, State of the Analytics Job Market

It's funny how one little bit stands out from a complicated work. Consider the one brief scene that you remember from a movie, or maybe one lonely line from a book. Some of us remember, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Others recall, "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done." But we might forget everything that happened in the 500-plus pages between those opening and closing lines of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. Granted, the 2011 McKinsey report Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity might not have the literary legs of a Dickens work, but it did set the stage in terms of defining the role and the importance of a data scientist. Six years later, however, most of us remember just one paragraph, the doomsday prediction of a data science talent gap, which we immediately paired with the Tom Davenport declaration that data scientist is the sexiest job. It's time to look at just how sexy the data science role turned out to be, and whether the data science talent gap really will put on chill on corporate analytics initiatives in 2018, just a few months from now. All Analytics Radio will host an interview with John Reed, senior executive director for recruiting firm Robert Half Technology, Thursday, March 23, at 1 pm (EDT).