Will a Skills Shortage Threaten the Future of Big Data?

IBA GroupMark HillaryAs the economy develops, old jobs vanish and new ones are created. This process has always taken place as technology creates new needs and old skills are replaced. Just consider how important the blacksmith used to be before cars were commonly used and if someone described themselves as a blogger or flash developer in 1985 it would have made no sense – times change.Big Data is another of these major changes. Not just in the sense that we are becoming able to analyse larger sets of data thanks to the technology becoming faster and more powerful – especially with more memory being available, but because the ability to do this work is now a skill itself. Understanding Big Data and being able to manipulate and analyse large sets of data is a popular skill to be exploring now as every analyst predicts that Big Data use is set to explode in the coming years.The analyst firm IDC wrote a study in 2012 that predicted the amount of data available to analyse would increase 50 times by 2020. This prediction remains true – if anything it may be even more by 2020 as new applications that create data are launched all the time – from smart watches to other wearable technologies.All this has led to a fear that there will not be enough people available to work on Big Data projects. McKinsey believes that the US will need almost 200,000 new data scientists by 2018 and the British Royal Academy of Engineering has predicted a need for 1.25 million graduates in science and technology subjects by 2020.A recent column in the British ‘Daily Telegraph’ claimed that this shortfall in data scientists might even be a threat to the future of business. But what all these concerns in the UK and US often fail to acknowledge is that there are many other countries with an abundance of data scientists.Offshore outsourcing has been long proven as a strategy for software development and other IT requirements. It will be exactly the same once data science becomes a mainstream part of every business. And companies like IBA Group are already doing it today.