According to a recent report published by the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), about 14 lakh people are likely to be employed in the BFSI industry by 2022. With a renewed focus on ‘financial inclusion’, the talent need for this sector will be higher than ever.

With the rising use of technology in banking services, recruiters are looking at different set of skills that would help them scale their business keeping the cost low. Banking professionals are expected to possess these skills apart from the specific functional competencies. Given this, we are bound to witness huge re-skilling efforts amongst banks. Banks today need a ‘digital workforce’ to converge diverse platforms like mobile solutions, social media, biometrics, etc, to render seamless and highly customized banking services.

As for the demand for big data expertise and Data science, across a range of occupations saw significant growth over the last twelve months. The hiring market for analytics professionals and data scientists has gone into an overdrive. Despite salary increases, companies are still struggling to hire.

So what will all this mean for this year? We have a few predictions:

1. Do you “C” it all?

This is the direction in which the business is going. If not the next year, surely in the years to come. The dependency of complex processes, such as managing any large organization effectively, on Big Data savvy C-level leaders has increased significantly.

2. Expanding the data science bandwagon

With the data science trend gaining momentum, we predict that legacy firms will build up their data science teams. Though the last year was pretty slow on the investments, this year is likely to see more of it, and a plan of attack for hiring. From tech firms like Google, LinkedIn, Amazon, or Ola, to legacy firms like the Citi, SwissRe, Standard Chartered, J P Morgan, organizations in every industry are boarding the data science bandwagon.

3. Statistical Analysis & Data Mining – Top skills

Among the skills that India will look to hire, statistical Analysis and Data Mining rank in the top 5. With the enormous increase of companies venturing into the analytics space, we have observed high demand for Data mining professionals. Bangalore is still considered to be the Analytics Hub.

4. Recruiting for startups gets tougher

With the rise in boutique Analytics firms, last couples of years have been good for them due the startup bubble and the hype has just barely begun to subside. But the next year, startups’ ability to attract rock star talent is likely to diminish. Professionals will be less apt to blindly leap into a startup hoping for a lottery win as they see many of their colleagues bombing out.

5. Blurred Lines – analytics and data science

As more predictive analytics professionals get accustomed to working with unstructured data, we believe that a natural evolution of analytics is likely to occur, with more analytics professionals picking up the skills necessary to work with the unstructured data that is common in data science.

6. Hadoop, say hello to Spark! SAS, what’s that?

The buzz that we have been hearing lately is around Spark. Hadoop is here to stay, though its mention in the Big data conversation is likely to decrease. Though the demand for SAS has diminished, Programming languages like R and Python are ubiquitous, and we believe that combination of these will still remain high on demand.

7. Analytics salaries to expect a hike

As per our salary studies, the average analytics salary (non-managers) is ₨ 8.5 Lakh and for managers is₨ 16 Lakh. They are likely to see a hike of 11%. Data scientist salaries are even higher, with the average (for non-managers) being ₨ 12 Lakh and for managers ₨ 18.3 Lakh. They are likely to see a hike of nearly 15%. This is going to be a challenge for the companies looking to hire Analytics talent as they would need to either match up to hikes in the industry or lure the candidates through other benefits.