India’s trying to become a digital analysis powerhouse. Source: Shutterstock

The growing demand for data analyts in India

By | 7 June, 2018

INDIA benefited from the IT boom a decade ago, and now, in the age of emerging technologies, the country is set to reap the dividends of its investment in IT-education once again.

The country’s top businesses are ramping up their analytics capabilities and as a result, looking for more and more candidates to fill the jobs they’re creating.

According to a new report, the number of new analytics jobs advertised per month increased by almost 76 percent from April 2017 to April 2018, which itself is a huge step up from 2015 and 2016 figures.

The number of new analytics jobs increased by 52 percent from April 2015 to April 2016, and by 40 percent from April 2014 to April 2015.

In fact, according to analysts who created the report, there are close to 78,000 open positions related to analytics in the job market.

Although it is difficult to ascertain the exact number of open analytics job openings, the conclusion drawn by the analysts seem to be supported by evidence from popular job boards in the country such as Times Jobs and Monster who list more than 1,000 jobs just for the data analyst position.

The country has more than 1000 job sites, and several smaller firms advertise job openings on social media groups such as All India Jobs and Analytics India Jobs.

Edvancer, who commissioned the report, identified JPMorgan, Accenture, Microsoft, Adobe, Flipkart, AIG, Ernst & Young, Wipro, Vodafone, and Deloitte as the companies with the most openings for data analytics.

Further, the report highlights that banking & financial services, followed by the energy & utilities, followed by the pharma & healthcare were the top sectors with openings for data analysis.

However, a drop of 5 percent was noted, year on year, for the demand for data analysts in banking and finance.

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Who qualifies as a data analyst?

Having so many open positions begs the question, what are companies looking for in prospective candidates?

The report has analyzed this and found that businesses are primarily looking for engineering graduates. Almost 48 percent of analytics job openings are looking for incumbents with a B.E./ B.Tech graduate degrees.

18 percent of analytics job openings are looking for a postgraduate degree (excluding MBAs and M.Techs) as well.

Only 8 percent of the jobs in the country require an MBA. Based on job descriptions reviewed on some of the portals listed above, this seems to be a requirement for only firms analyzing a niche or those seeking to shorten the learning curve and have the incumbent hit the ground running.

Now, here’s the interesting bit. The report suggests that the median salaries for an analytics position is about INR 1.8 lakhs per annum (approx US$16,100), however, analysts remind readers that actual salaries tend to be lower than advertised in the first place.

ADSA participants at the ASEAN Data Analytics eXchange (ADAX)ADSA participants at the ASEAN Data Analytics eXchange (ADAX)

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The rising demand for data analysts, however, is natural.

There are several companies in India who’re investing in a data analysis wing, and several foreign businesses are working on setting up a data analysis center in India to support their global operations. Recent examples include Walmart and NEC.

In the coming years, with comparatively lower wages and better availability of the right kind of people, the country might just become the world’s largest data processor and analyst.



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