How to Search for Data Science Jobs
This article describes the technical details of how to search for jobs in the field of data science.
Some software used for data science is also used by a wide range of other tasks. Let’s consider a few examples. General purpose languages, such as C, Java, or Python are used heavily for some data science tasks, but if you do a job search on just their names, the great majority of jobs found will not be for data science. Other software such as Cognos, SAS, and Tableau are very popular for simple report writing as well as for data science jobs. Therefore simple searches will find a blend of both types of jobs. Finally, some software, such as Apache Spark, SPSS, or Stata are very specific to data science. With such a mix of software, the challenge is to use search terms that will yield values that are comparable across all types of software.
To compile a list of search terms that are specific to data science jobs, I started out searching for jobs that required software that is used specifically for data science. I then looked for terms that often appeared in those job descriptions. Next, I searched for jobs that featured only those terms, one at a time. Some, such as “analytics” resulted in searches that were not well focused; jobs that had nothing to do with data science would appear. Others, such as “econometrics”, did indeed focus on data science jobs, but only in the field of economics. As I worked my way through these searches, I found more search terms to test. The results are shown in Table 1.
Ideally, one could include all the focused terms in a search, but Indeed.com’s search feature limits the size of the search string. To determine the maximum string size, I put in the longest software string and then added in the data science terms. The data science terms then truncated to show the limit. Table 2 shows the resulting set of search terms that I used to append to each software title. For example, when searching for Java, I would enter: Java and (“big data” or “data analytics” or …”statistician”).
Table 2. The data science terms and logic that are appended to every job search.
Some software offered additional challenges. Those with letter names, C and R, were found using spaces before and after their names, such as (” R ” or ” R,”) .
