Big data is making news for its uses and also for the scope of jobs it can generate in future. Here is a roundup of how online courses can help overcome the existing skill gap in this domain
Big data is the catch phrase for most large organisations these days. The next thing you hear associated with big data is ‘business’, ‘opportunity’, ‘future’, ‘jobs’ and sadly ‘skill gap’ too.
Big data may be the backbone of business strategies today – and certainly in future too. However, the glaring gap between trained professionals in big data vis-À-vis the personnel requirement is visible too.
The Glaring Truth The future may sound bright and nice but the paucity of trained – or rather – aptly trained professionals in the field is a big disappointment. Today, people in big data jobs are typically from a mix of IT, statistics and data analysis. These people may have done courses to ramp up their qualifications and skills for these jobs or may have learnt these skills on jobs.
In fact, The Mckinsey Global Institute had predicted in a report earlier that by 2018, the US alone could face a shortage of between 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills, and a shortage of 1.5 million managers and analysts who can leverage data analysis to make effective decisions for their organisations. The numbers for India too could be equally staggering.
Organisations and educational institutes too recognise this gap and hence a number of training partnerships and courses have sprung up. The latest addition in this league is the emergence of online courses, featuring big data and its further specialised streams.
The Online Tutors Online educational service providers like Edureka, Jigsaw Academy, Simplilearn, Blueoceanlearning and NIIT Analytics and many others are providing big data courses.
Recently, Bangalore-based Edureka announced a partnership with data integration software provider Talend to offer courses in big data. This course is aimed at enabling professionals to learn and understand HDFS, Pig and Hive for ETL, and data warehousing. The idea is to make big data learning simpler even for somebody with a non-programming background, the course provides insights on how to work with Big Data and Hadoop, said a company release.
Simplilearn already has 11 courses in this domain spanning across basics of big data, platforms of Hadoop and Spark to NoSql databases like MongoDB and Cassandra.
“We have more than 2,500 students enrolling on monthly basis for the big data course categories,” says Ankur Arora, head of category at Simplilearn. “Of these learners, about 85 per cent are professionals with at least 2-3 years of work experience. Our courses are intended to help professionals become job ready. Also, mid-level professionals undergoing career stagnation can take up these courses to move from traditional technologies to big data, further helping them in scout for better career opportunities. We have close to 25 highly-qualified and certified trainers with industry relevant experience deliver trainings in big data and analytics,” says Arora.
Another e-course provider Jigsaw Academy has an equally popular course on big data. “We get upwards of 300-400 students every month for our big data courses alone. This excludes the people who we train on big data via our corporate and college training modules,” says Sarita Digumarti, COO and co-founder of Jigsaw Academy. “Roughly, 95 per cent of the people who take our courses are working professionals. We have more than 20 trainers who are industry experts and have a good 4-5 years of experience working with big data in large companies such as HP and Accenture,” she says.
The reason for the popularity of these courses is not hard to guess. “The days of single skilled employees are gone and companies are looking to hire people with a spectrum of skills and who can contribute at multiple stages of the process. Big Data itself has multiple processes such as analysis, visualisation, databases, data processing and querying. Typically, companies want people who have big data skill sets and also can analyse & visualisthe data and people who can connect big data systems to other tools like R and Tableau. It is all about being multi-skilled,” says Sarita.
Simplilearn’s Ankur Arora has another case in point. He says, “As per IDC, the big data technology and services market is estimated to reach $48.6 billion by 2019 at 23.1 per cent CAGR. Today, it is not enough to just know Hadoop. There is a lot of demand for Spark. So is the requirement for NoSqL databases. Now big data is being integrated with high end analytics tools resulting in Pyhadoop and Rhadoop. It is also required to be able to have some machine learning skills for advanced analytics.”
And there is a bright future awaiting these people. Jigsaw Academy’s Sarita estimates that there is great need for people who can manage large volumes of data. “Whatever people are doing in the data space currently, the model systems are going to move to big data. People with big data are going to be in even more demand in the coming years,” she says.
“We get upwards of 300-400 students every month for our big data courses alone. This excludes the people who we train on big data via our corporate and college training modules,” says Sarita Digumarti, COO and co-founder of Jigsaw Academy. “Roughly, 95 per cent of the people who take our courses are working professionals.”
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