Many organisations are continuing to struggle with major recruitment gaps in their big data skillsets. While the very largest and best known firms attract the top candidates, most are finding it almost impossible to find appropriately skilled staff.
This is one of the findings of Computing's latest research into big data, which will be revealed at the upcoming Big Data and Analytics Summit at the Hilton Tower Bridge in central London on 17 March.
"As much as there are more resources now, there's still a big barrier in terms of getting and finding the right resources to build, to deliver," a big data architect in the retail sector said.
A chief data scientist added: "We're playing catch up to Facebook and Google."
Computing first identified the problems in recruiting data scientists back in 2014, reporting at the time that most sectors besides technology and finance were struggling.
Back to 2016, and other firms found that some applicants were strong on mathematical skills, but lacked an essential understanding of the business, with a software engineer working at a major utility stating: "There is a gap as the right people come from academia, they have a lot of knowledge, but they may be lacking practical skills from working in industry. You need to be given the time to learn. It should take less than a year to get up to speed. It means working to deadlines, working in an agile team and that takes some time."
Another CTO stated that he needs to find a broader range of people with experience of Spark and Cassandra.
"It would be great to have more people with Spark/Cassandra and big data skills. They are out there, but they tend to be more seasoned developers who have been around the block a few times and have become involved as they became aware of it. But at junior level, those skillsets don't seem to be there," he said.
There is some hope for the future though, with a chief data scientist explaining that universities are adding relevant courses to their rosters.
"Universities, in this country and the States, are actually introducing about 50 new Masters degrees, even PhDs in data science. They didn't exist even two years ago. There will be a whole lot of people coming into this market to fill these gaps. They're not there yet but it will happen."
Computing's research found that it was mainly larger organisations with more than 5,000 staff who were recruiting data scientists. Most commonly these firms were in technology, retail and finance.
Computing will present the entirety of its research at the Big Data and Analytics Summit 2016. Attendance is free to qualified end users.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Stuart Sumner
Quelle/Source: computing, 18.02.2016
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