Mathematicians and data engineers remain some of the hottest job titles among employers, according to a new breakdown of data from Burning Glass’s NOVA platform, which analyzes millions of active job postings.
That shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who monitors NOVA’s data; mathematicians placed in the top spot last month, too, followed by data engineers and actuaries. That job postings for mathematicians grew 73 percent in September—on top of 80.6 percent in August—just shows that companies are really, really hungry for people who can crunch tons of data.
Here’s the full chart:
Data engineers are in second place, most likely for a similar reason to mathematicians: companies need employees who can evaluate, clean, analyze, and draw useful insights from massive amounts of data. Indeed, many of the job titles on this month’s list are analysts or specialists whose typical job descriptions involve churning through big datasets as efficiently as possible.
It also helps that mathematicians are necessary in pretty much every industry and sub-discipline, from heavy industry to entertainment. Whereas some companies might need a math genius simply to balance the books, tech firms increasingly rely on mathematicians for cutting-edge projects such as artificial intelligence (A.I.) and machine learning.
Within tech, mathematicians can’t just get by with a good grasp of the numbers; they often must know their way around software packages specific to their particular discipline. For example, those who work with business intelligence and so-called “Big Data” must often have working knowledge of Hadoop, containers, and Kubernetes. Meanwhile, those who work for popular websites must know how to crunch numbers via Google Analytics and other monitoring platforms.
The NOVA data just re-emphasizes what analysts have been telling us for years: That the hunger for employees who can effectively analyze numbers isn’t slackening anytime soon. In 2017, a report from consulting firm McKinsey & Co. suggested a national shortage of as many as 190,000 people with “deep analytical skills” by the end of 2018. The above list shows that companies are still very much on the hunt for those folks.
