Careers in Analytics

Reading Time: 3 mins

We’re doing an analytics roadshow with UpGrad, AnalyticsVidhya and IIIT-B. The event’s tagline is “The next 100 thousand jobs in analytics.”

How far away are 100,000 jobs? Not far at all — Naukri reports 36,000 active analytics jobs, while LinkedIn has 22,000 analytics professionals in India already.

It’s useful to understand where these jobs are coming from. Let’s explore the Naukri database.

To begin with, we find that the IT industry is absorbing almost half of all of the analytics jobs. Banking is the second largest, but trails at almost one fourth of IT’s recruiting volume. It is interesting that data rich industries like Retail, Energy and Insurance are trailing near the bottom, lower than even construction or media, who handle less data. Perhaps these are ripe for disruption through analytics?

Among Bangalore leads the cities, followed closely by the Delhi NCR. Mumbai is next. Between them, they cover over 50% of the demand. These cities are also hubs not just for analytics, but for any data job in general.

Does this mean you need to be in Bangalore looking for an IT job to get into analytics? Well, it does help, but it’s useful to know which companies are recruiting specific cities. For example, at Hyderabad, pharma companies like Novartis Healthcare and E I DuPont are recruiting actively. So are financial services companies like Invesco and Thomson Reuters.

These jobs typically pay between 6-10 lakhs. Of course, this varies based on level of experience. There are 30 open positions today that pay over Rs 1 cr, as well as over 5,000 positions that pay under Rs 3 lakhs. But there’s no doubt that a career in analytics is lucrative and has a heavy upside — at least for the scale of recruiting that is ongoing. (Investment banking does pay more. But there are far fewer jobs.)

The most common educational requirement is an engineering degree, followed by an MBA. Among the graduates, the preference for engineers is overwhelming, and the demand for a B.Com, B.Sc or B.A is less than a sixth of the demand for an engineer. On the post-graduation side, the difference is less stark. An MBA is preferred marginally over M.Tech who are preferred marginally over CA, MCA or MS.

So there you are. The classic candidate for an analytics job is an engineer with an MBA working for a software company in Bangalore. But there’s enough room for analytics jobs for any graduate in Hyderabad in pharma companies, or in Pune at telecom companies and so on.

What you need is to prepare yourself with the right skills. Join us at the analytics roadshow. We’ll explain what it takes.