7 Big Data Jobs You Need to Know

This is part of a Penton Technology special series on big data. 

In my job as an editor I see a lot of statistics thrown around on technology, so it’s not often that I read one that really wows me. Get this: nearly six million jobs were created in the US last year to work on big data projects. This is according to a slideshow from Bernard Marr, the author of Big Data: Using Smart Big Data, Analytics and Metris to Make Better Decisions.

To break it down, 1.9 million jobs were created in the US last year to work on the IT-side of big data projects, but each of these jobs is supported by 3 new jobs outside of IT. Isn’t that incredible?

Jobs that require big data expertise pay well, too. The average salary, according to a report by Forbes last year, is $124,000 net of bonuses and compensation. With all of this in mind, it makes sense that there are more training opportunities opening up for positions related to big data. Take for example the NYC Data Science Academy, which offers a full-time bootcamp for a career as a data scientist, or DataCamp, which offers online courses to learn data science skills such as R, Python or data visualization.

Of course, data scientists are just one of the jobs related to big data.

According to a blog post by Pete Ianace, chief strategy officer and executive vice president of No Magic Inc., a software company based in Texas, data scientists require the support of other roles in order to add value.

“The dirty little secret of big data analytics is all the work that goes into prepping and cleaning the data before it can be analyzed. You may have the sharpest data scientists on the planet writing the most advanced algorithms the universe has ever seen, but it won’t amount to a hill of beans if your data set is dirty, incomplete, or flawed. That’s why up to 80 percent of the time and effort in big data analytic projects is spent on cleaning, integrating, and transforming the data.”

In this slideshow Talkin’ Cloud explores 7 jobs related to big data and their average salaries*. Click through to learn more.

*Salaries are an approximation and vary company to company. Average salary data is taken from Payscale.