The number of vacancies for data science jobs on the top job portals in India increased by 53% from when India eased the lockdown restrictions on June 8 to Nov 30, according to the data collated by AIMResearch.
Data science is a field which uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from many structural and unstructured data. It includes data mining, machine learning and big data, amongst others.
Even though total job opportunities offered in data science have somewhat reduced from December last year to June 2020, India’s share in total in open data science jobs in the world increased from 7.2% in January to 9.8% in August.
There are many reasons for increasing demand of data scientists, one of them being changing market structure due to the pandemic.
Businesses had already realized the importance of data driven solutions but the pandemic has accelerated adoption of this technology by businesses who were hesitant to adopt it earlier due to high cost, unavailability of workforce skilled in these technologies and other concerns.
Rise in amount of data generated
Due to the lockdowns, most of the businesses have shifted online. Consumer behavior has also changed considerably, for instance there’s been a huge rise in online activities on e-commerce platforms. All this has generated huge amount of data.
Ed-Tech also gained popularity during the lockdown since traditional ways of acquiring education like schools, colleges had to close down.
Due to similar reasons, people have also been choosing the online payment mode much more often than before.
The Unified Payments Interface recorded 2.07 billion transactions worth Rs 3860 billion in the month of October, according to information released by National Payments Corporation of India. This is the first time UPI has achieved the elusive feat of 2 billion transactions since it was launched in 2016.
Streaming platforms like Netflix, PrimeVideo, etc have had their subscribers doubled during the Covid.
All these developments have led to an increase in data available with the businesses.
How these developments can contribute to businesses’ growth and employment creation
This is a great opportunity for businesses as now they can process the huge data available with them, gain more insights into consumer behaviors and use this newfound knowledge to grow their business.
Any data is useful only when it can be analyzed and processes meaningfully, a process which requires skilled data scientists. With more data available, there is definitely going to be an increase in jobs in the field of data science.
As is said, data is the new oil. And India is one of the largest producers of data. It would really benefit Indian businesses if the government comes out with a single framework under which data and its processing processing is regulated.
Komal is an English literature student with a keen interest in economic developments and politics amongst others. She is a part of Research & Content team at HrNxt.com