Attrition is a serious concern for analytics industry in India, especially when the availability of data scientists is called out as the biggest challenge facing organizations. Whenever, a well trained and knowledgeable employee leaves, the organization loses key skills, knowledge and business relationships. Moreover, there are serious costs involved in replacing that employee.

In this independent study, we try to put in some numbers around attrition rates in the analytics industry. This study is an outcome of a sample size of 20 largest analytics recruiters and the analysis of their current strength and past employees.

The main objective of this study is to provide benchmarking against which employee attrition can be measured. We will keep expanding the study over the year, as we accumulate more data as well as needs.

• The average employee attrition in Analytics & Data Science Industry in India currently stands at 24.4% annually.
• Also, analytics employees tend to stay in their organization for an average of 3.7 Years.
• In terms of the organization type, the analytics function at IT providers tends to have the highest attrition at 26%. IT service providers are the biggest recruiters of analytics professionals and therefore tend to skew the overall attrition rates higher.
• GIC’s/ Captive have an employee attrition at 22.1%, followed by Consulting firms at 21.9% and Boutique analytics firms at 21.6%.

• IT service providers also tend to have the highest tenure of analytics professionals in their current organizations, at 4.5 years. We noticed no correlation between years in the current organization to attrition rates.
• Captives have an average of 3.9 years as employee tenure followed by consulting firms at 3.3 years and Boutique analytics firms at 3 years.

Attrition Trends by Cities

• Mumbai currently has the highest annual attrition rates in analytics, at 25.7%. The city boasts of a robust data science ecosystem, mostly from banking and finance industry. Coupled with high salaries and demand for data scientists, Mumbai is pushed to the highest position in terms of employee attrition.
• Chennai, on the other hand, has the lowest attrition rates, at just 15.5%.
• It is evident that larger cities, with bigger employee base in analytics (Bangalore, Mumbai & Delhi/ NCR) have higher attrition rates, higher than 20%. While, cities with lesser employee base have in turn lower attrition rates, lesser than 20%.

• Also, current analytics employees in Mumbai are on average staying their current organizations for an average of 4.2 years. As earlier mentioned, we did not find any correlation with attrition rates and tenure.
• Tenure of analytics professionals in Chennai is highest, at 4.5 years.

Attrition Trends by Experience Level

• Employee attrition increases with a decrease in experience levels. Younger employees tend to jump jobs more often.
• At senior level i.e. more than 10 years experience, the attrition rates for analytics industry stands at just 13.7%.
• While at fresher’s level, the attrition rates are almost 80%.

• The same is true for average tenure in the current organization. More than 10 years experience has an average tenure of 7 Years.