Fixing The Big Data Skills Shortage Problem

To what extent do you think there’s a data science skills shortage? There’s always a skills shortage where there’s a new technology, new discipline or new way of working. Big data’s not new. It’s been around for a long time. It’s been around for about 10 years in Silicon Valley, mainstream over here for about

To what extent do you think there’s a data science skills shortage?

There’s always a skills shortage where there’s a new technology, new discipline or new way of working. Big data’s not new. It’s been around for a long time. It’s been around for about 10 years in Silicon Valley, mainstream over here for about five years, quite a few companies are already utilising it, it’s working for them and they’re reaping the benefits.

About 40 per cent are going into cloud, using security software etc but with data analytics there’s a certain element of that, certainly within the data science space, that’s a brand new skill set. It might not be new to some but in the market, when it’s imperative to have it if you want to reap the benefits of your data, there’s nobody out there really.

The approach to this market has to be different. You can’t be a generalist recruitment company applying the same approach to the market where there’s such a shortage.

I think the only way we can do it effectively is to partner up with other businesses, collaborate closely with data science training academies – this is just for data science, mind you, not for the other disciplines – and partner with data and analytics consulting businesses.

We also need to make sure we’re educating and talking to the customers about what is actually available, where it is and what they have to do in order to be attractive.

What should companies be doing to attract people with the skills they need?

There are a couple of different methods, depending on what the business drivers are. You have big businesses like BT that have a ‘no redundancy’ policy.

They are retraining. Smart companies need to look at the existing skills that they’ve got and where they can be transferred.