Pay package
At PayScale.com, the average salary indicated for an entry-level data analyst is Rs. 257,383 per year. The skills that increase pay for this job the most are SAS, SPSS and quality improvement/QA.
A mid-career data analyst earns an average salary of Rs. 400,236 per year. The highest paying skills associated with this job are database, SAS, Microsoft SQL server and SQL (refer charts).
Some industry experts preferred to keep the pay packages confidential and the others gave us a basic idea. At Costarch, Soni informs, “We do recruit engineers to work in this domain with our company but we do not have any fixed pay package for our recruits and it depends very much on their skill sets. But to give you an idea, the entry-level package varies between Rs. 240,000 and Rs. 450,000 and for experienced professionals, it varies between Rs. 500,000 to Rs. 1,000,000.”
Demand areas
Vivek Madhukar, COO, TimesJobs.com explained, “DA is a high-demand profession that is going to continue to attract the best and brightest technological minds for a long time to come—many CIOs today started out as DA specialists. DA is the job of finding business insights in figures and facts—at a junior-to-mid-level career this comprises extracting information from raw data. At a mid-to-senior-level position, this information is processed into knowledge that is leveraged for business growth.”
He further adds, “If you are someone who is good at discovering and communicating meaningful patterns in data and are looking for a career in DA, target IT software companies and be prepared to relocate to the south—as Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad account for almost half of the jobs available in this sector.”
According to the data provided by TimesJobs.com, the top industries hiring DA professionals is the IT industry with about 42 per cent share of jobs followed by the manufacturing and engineering industry with a share of 10 per cent. Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) and ITES-BPO (information technology-enabled service-business process outsourcing) have 9 per cent and 4 per cent of the jobs, respectively (refer pie charts).
Apart from Bangalore and Mumbai that feature in the list of top locations for jobs in the DA field with 25 per cent and 16 per cent, respectively, Delhi shares 19 per cent of the jobs and, Chennai and Hyderabad with 10 per cent of the jobs each. Remaining jobs are scattered in other locations (refer pie charts).
Skills expected
Both freshers and experienced graduates should have a balanced mix of left brain and right brain skills, informs Anand. They need to be able to both count and connect the dots, be curious enough to question everything they see and sceptical enough not to accept every answer they hear, be both an analyst and an artist.
Key skills include logical thinking, analytical bent of mind, strong grip on mathematics, statistics and concepts of probability. Madhukar says, “Those who are comfortable playing with numbers complemented with data visualisation, good business understanding and communication skills will do very well.”
Talking about AbsolutData, Datta says, “The major areas that we expect people to be strong are quantitative ability, problem-solving skills, good aptitude and lateral thinking.” On the other hand, Soni notes, “The skill sets required to excel in this area include, interest in number crunching, good logic reasoning, knowledge and experience with some statistical package, programming knowledge and should be able to think out of the box.”
Future
DA is a 23 billion dollar industry, informs Datta. She says, “Over the last decade, India has witnessed a change in even top tier strategy consulting companies using data-based decision making, surely the trend is changing. Eventually data-based analytics is going to be the space to watch out for!”
With encouraging career prospects and amongst the most well-paid careers, DA jobs surely seem to be the next big thing for engineers to consider. It is already beginning to revamp businesses and their ability to compete by helping them make smarter decisions. Analytics is the new career choice for those who want to stay ahead.
Analytics is not too much into tools or technologies, it is a method of thinking that permits the use of knowledge, tools and technologies to extract valuable insights from data. Analytics jobs and careers exist in most large companies in almost every industry vertical.
