The Most In-Demand Skills in Analytics

The skills needed by organizations has seen a rapid transformation. While earlier there was a need to be able to work on different aspects of analytics, now there is greater consolidation in job roles and descriptions.

This is the age of the analytics specialist. Organizations are on the lookout for people with subject matter expertise within an area of analytics and the domain knowledge in their specific sector to set the business context. With this trend, the current set of skills that employers are looking for is quite different from what was needed a year ago.

Machine Learning

Machine Learning has seen a meteoric rise in terms of industry application in the last few years. Companies are embracing it to automate their iterative tasks, build AI applications, predict user behaviour with greater accuracy. Among its more interesting and futuristic applications are self-driving cars, fully automated homes, natural language processing (NLP), predicting and trading stocks and virtual assistants.

Data from the jobs portal Indeed shows that Machine Learning job listings outweigh the Machine Learning job searches by a ratio of 3:2. This points to a shortfall of 33% in the jobs needed to be filled and the growing demand for people with Machine Learning skills.

Data Visualization and Storytelling

Organizations have come to realize that it is not only about analysing the data, but also about how you present it that gets the work done. Data Visualization and Storytelling set the business context of what the data is saying and makes it simpler for the management and non-analysts to understand the model to make decisions based on it.

Data visualization is going to revolutionize how we work with data. Because it compresses information quickly, we can get better insights, faster. It also helps us learn to look at data more creatively, more imaginatively and more holistically.

Domain Knowledge

It is not enough to know how to analyse the data, but there is also a need to understand how the analyses apply to a business problem in a domain. Companies need analysts who have a strong business understanding, without which the analyses are just numbers and models without an application to the end game. Business domain knowledge has become a pre-requisite for many analytics roles now.

More domains are opening-up to analytics and Machine Learning, with the below domains in the need for skilled analytics professionals:

• Supply chain
• Social media & monitoring
• Text mining & NLP
• Internet of Things
• Credit risk & fraud

Get more such amazing insights and trends prevailing in the Indian Analytics sector with the Analytics Industry Report 2017! Download now!

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