The Data on Big Data

Today, I was checking out the ACM CareerNews and I was excited to see an article about how IT leaders wanted to hire chief data officers this year. The article said that research shows that IT leaders expect "Chief Data Officer" to become an established board-level role by 2020. As someone who has recently started learning about data science and the R programming language, this sounded especially exciting to me.

After reading this article, I read another article about the hottest tech skills for 2015. I was surprised to see that big data's demand is supposed to cool off this year. Although there are more jobs on Dice.com, pay rates slowed late last year according to the Foote Partners Survey.

As someone exploring the realm of data analysis, I have to wonder how much credence we can give to
all these statistics. Where is the data coming from? Is it fairly representative of the entire market? Are there certain big data skills that are dropping in demand/pay premium while others are rising (and thus interfering with the overall average)?

Another article had cited Data Scientist as one of the top 10 jobs for 2015. I suppose the statistics in the Foote Partners Survey do not negate that. Just because the pay premium is not as high, does not mean that data scientists are not well compensated and it also does not mean that there are not many available openings in the field.

I would love to do further analysis on the data and statistics compiled to come up with all these rankings and statistics. It would be great to see the reports in detail.

Regardless of the statistics, I love data science/analysis so I am going to keep on learning it!

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