Looking for a job? There are 93,500 openings in this field

As many as 93,500 data science jobs were vacant in India at the end of August 2020, showed a study by edtech firm Great Learning.

The study said despite the coronavirus pandemic, India contributed 9.8 percent to the total global analytics job openings in August 2020, compared to 7.2 percent in January this year.

While the sector did witness a slight decrease in vacancies (from 109,000 vacancies in February to 82,500 vacancies in May 2020), the demand has continued to be fairly consistent across key industry sectors.

Moneycontrol reported that close to 10.8 million jobs have been lost so far due to the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown.

Data science jobs provide an alternative career option to these job seekers, provided they are upskilled to meet the demands of the role.

According to the Great Learning study, the factors contributing to the increased demand for data science include a year-on-year increase in funding in Indian analytics startups and investment in the development of enhanced analytics capabilities in India, among others.

"Over the last year, we have seen an immense growth in the demand for professionals proficient with skills in data science and analytics. A key reason for this is the increased availability of top of the line analytics talent in India which has led to captive firms and international IT and KPO corporations moving more of their business to India, investing in newer technologies and digital competencies and opening new positions here,” said Hari Krishnan Nair, Co-founder, Great Learning.

The research presented in this report has been collected from publicly available data, including news reports, job sites, and other information sources.

 Hiring by experience levels

The study showed that there is a demand for mid- and senior-level professionals with over seven years of experience in 2020. Last year was dominated by the demand for young professionals.

Professionals with more than 7 years of experience commanded the highest proportion of jobs with a share of 14.9 percent in August 2020, up from 12.5 percent in January 2020, and 6.7 percent last year.

Interestingly, the demand for those with 10 to 15 years of experience increased to 11 percent in August 2020 after doubling to 8.6 percent in January 2020 from last year.

The demand for those with mora than 15 years of experience has also witnessed a big leap to 4.9 percent in August 2020 after almost tripling to 2.8 percent in January 2020 from 1 percent last year.

City-wise demand

Bengaluru continues to create the maximum number of jobs, contributing around 23 percent of analytics jobs in India, a marginal increase from last year, followed by Delhi-NCR at 20 percent, and Mumbai at approximately 15 percent.

Other popular metros like Hyderabad, Pune, and Chennai witnessed marginal growth in the proportion of  jobs in August 2020 over the last year.

Interestingly, the proportion of jobs advertised for Tier-II and Tier-III cities has increased this year to 10.5 percent from 8.4 percent in January 2020.

Great Learning said this is mainly because the pandemic has led to the adoption of remote working and hiring. This trend is expected to last till the second quarter of 2021.

Industry-wise demand

Apart from IT, the BFSI sector is the largest recruiter of analytics and data science talent (outside of IT), creating around 35 percent of all analytics jobs in the country.

Among others, the pharmaceutical sector has seen an increase in the proportion of analytics jobs at 16.3 percent, an overall increase of 3.9 percent over the last year. This is due to the focus on developing vaccines and other cures for the novel coronavirus.

Top recruiters

The list of 10 leading organisations with the most number of analytics openings this year is dominated by the IT and KPO players such as Accenture, Mphasis, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Capgemini, Infosys, Tech Mahindra, IBM India, Dell, HCL, and Collabera Technologies.

When it comes to the IT sector, almost 68 percent of the demand is getting generated by MNC IT & KPO Service Providers, the highest this year but have decreased from 74.6 percent at the start of the year.

Jobs in captive units in India, which stated one of the highest analytics job requirements three years ago, have now fallen to 5.8 percent in August 2020.

Salary trends

The study further reveals that the median salary for data science professionals in India stands at Rs 9.5 lakh per annum in 2020 as per the listed job openings.

For those with more than a decade of experience, packages are in the range of Rs 25 lakh to Rs 50 lakh depending on the role and expertise.

Skills in demand

The demand for Python professionals continues to remain the highest among recruiters with almost 27 percent of the jobs requiring Python as the core skill.

It is closely followed by Java/JavaScript that is witnessing a 22 percent demand. R comes third in the list at 10 percent, the same as last year.

Among Dashboarding and business intelligence (BI) tools, Tableau skills are most in demand at 11 percent in August 2020, followed by Microsoft Power BI contributing 6.5 percent.

With greater adoption of cloud platforms across enterprises, the demand for cloud solutions including AWS (15 percent), Azure Skills (9.7 percent), and Google Cloud (5 percent) continued to soar even during the lockdown.