Career opportunities in big data that you should consider
Big data – business organizations and other sectors have stopped treating it as a buzzword, and have initiated plans to use it. Now is the time for you to enroll in big data courses, to take advantages of the new opportunities being created for data science professionals.
Big data is a term used to refer to the voluminous amount of data made easily available through the web. Everything from scientific research, medical research, historical records, books, music, paintings, photographs, videos are all accessible online.
But this is not the only data. Right now we are creating so much information, it can be hard to gather and manage it all. To put this in perspective, it is said that the total amount of information that humanity managed to accumulate over millennia amounts to around 5 exabytes. We now generate that much data every two days.
This comes in many forms like database data, shared information, reviews on products and companies, audio, images and video files being created and shared over the web. This data covers everything from science and arts to shared opinions on products and services. All this information can be valuable when filtered and put in context.
However, the volume, the speed at which the data comes in, and the varied forms it takes make it hard to access and analyze them using traditional data processing methods. This is where big data technologies like Hadoop, Spark etc., come in. These enable organizations to gather, organize and analyze this data to extract rich veins of relevant information that would benefit them in many ways.
This is creating opportunities for data analytics professionals to find new niches and define new career paths. It is predicted that by 2018, the big data market will be worth $47 billion. This will also open up around 140,000 to 190,000 job opportunities in our country alone.
Big data job profiles
Skills and knowledge that will be in high demand include big data, Hadoop, Python, VMWare, software development, and open source technologies. Salaries for big data experts is predicted to start at around $105,000 and climb above that. This has prompted a huge demand for big data courses. Some big data related job profiles include:
- Statistician
They gather and make sense of quantitative data, helping businesses spot trends and arrive at predictions that could help improve business performance. - Business intelligence engineers
They perform data analysis, design and set up queries and reports for extracting relevant information that management executives would need to decide future strategies. - Big data engineers
They are responsible for using and integrating various techniques to build and maintain big data solutions that are relevant to the organization. - Data scientists
These professionals use their knowledge and skills to extract relevant and deep insights from big data. - Machine learning scientists
They do R&D work, creating algorithms that are implemented in adaptive systems, that is machines or systems that learn and adapt their output with consecutive use. These systems analyze and identify patterns from big data, and use this in making forecasts and providing suggestions for new products or services or ideas for improvements in existing products.
These are just a few of the positions that could be open to you after you complete one or more of the best big data courses.