Over 93,500 data science jobs vacant in India

Over 93,500 data science jobs were vacant in India at the end of August 2020, a study conducted by EdTech company Great Learning said.

Despite Covid-19, the enthusiasm and optimism around the analytics function continues to remain high with India contributing 9.8 per cent of the total global analytics job openings in August 2020 compared to 7.2 per cent in January this year, it said.

While the sector did witness a 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. The factors contributing to the increased demand include a year-on-year increase in funding in Indian analytics startups, investment in the development of enhanced analytics capabilities in India, and a greater proportion of jobs outsourced to firms based in India owing to the pandemic, it added.

The current demand is dominated by MNC and domestic IT & KPO organisations that are shifting jobs to India and are recruiting in large numbers.

The study tracked data science job landscape in 2020, including the impact that Covid-19 has had on the vacancies in the sector. It revealed the growing demand for mid and senior level professionals with over seven years of experience in 2020.

"While 2019 was dominated by young professionals in terms of the number of jobs available, this is the year when the industry is pulling all the stops for the mid-level and senior counterparts," the study said.

Bengaluru continues to create the maximum number of jobs, contributing around 23 per cent of analytics jobs in India, a marginal increase from last year, followed by Delhi/NCR at 20 per cent and Mumbai at approximately 15 per cent. Despite the BFSI sector continuing to be the largest recruiter of analytics and data science talent (outside of IT), creating around 35 per cent of all analytics jobs in the country, the contribution of the sector has been going down year on year from 41 per cent in 2018 to 38.3 per cent in 2019 and 35 per cent in August 2020.

Interestingly, pharma sector has seen an increase in the proportion of analytics jobs at 16.3 per cent, an overall increase of 3.9 per cent over the last year.

"This is due to the focus on developing vaccines and other cures for the Covid 19 virus", the study said.

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

The study further revealed that the median salary for data science professionals in India stands at Rs 9.5 lakh/annum in 2020 as per the listed job openings (the actual salary is generally higher than the listed salary).

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, it was stated.

The demand for 'Python' professionals continues to remain the highest among recruiters with almost 27 per cent of the jobs requiring Python as the core skill. It is closely followed by Java/JavaScript that is witnessing a 22 per cent demand.