For the last several years, several reports from think-tanks like McKinsey, Deloitte and Harvard have consistently forecasted that the demand for analytics professionals would supersede the supply. However, it is only in the last two years that the majority of organizations have started filling this gap like never before. In such a scenario, salary becomes an important factor for professionals looking for lucrative career options.
An initiative by Analytics India Magazine in partnership with AnalytixLabs, the focus of this study is to compare the salary trends amongst professionals, specializing in different skills and tools, while also providing an overview of the analytics salary in key Indian metropolitan cities as well as companies and across various experience levels.
Below, we have listed down the key takeaways from the study. For the complete study, download the report brochure from the end of this article.
Key Trends:
- The average analytics salary in India for year ending 2015 was INR 9.5 Lacs across all experience level and skill sets.
- There is an increase in the percentage of people, from 36.6% in 2015 to 42.2% in 2016, in lowest salary band as more freshers (specifically to analytics domain) joined the workforce.
- A large number of job openings and hiring happening for the less experienced in tier B cities, but with lower average salaries has brought down the overall average salary scene in the sector across the country.
- Conversely, the overall salaries in metropolitan cities, individually, has increased from 2015.
- On one hand, the Analytics professionals commanding salaries less than INR 6 Lacs has gone up from 36.6% in 2015 to 42.2% in 2016; while Analytics professionals earning more than INR 15 Lacs has increased from 10.5% in 2015 to 11.3% in 2016.
- Analytics professionals with salaries in extreme brackets i.e. less than 6 lakhs & more than 15 lakhs have increased, whereas professionals in bracket 6-15 lakhs have decreased since last year.
Salary Trends across Tools & Skills:
- Advanced analytics/predictive modeling professionals are paid the highest salaries compared to their analytics peers i.e. 12.1 Lacs on average.
- Big data professionals and data mining professionals get up to 9.7 Lacs & 9.5 lacs on average.
- BI, Reporting , MIS professionals get upto 7.1 Lacs on average and data engineer an average of 6.7 Lacs.
- Within Big data profiles:
- Hadoop professionals command an average of 9.9 Lacs
- Spark professionals command an average of 8.8 Lacs.
- NoSql/ MangoDB professionals receive an average of 11.1 Lacs.
- Qlikview professionals command marginally higher than Tableau professionals in visualization skill jobs – 9.5 Lacs vs 9 Lacs on an average.
- Within Advanced Analytics profiles:
- On an average, professionals get up to 10.8 Lacs for R, vs 9.1 Lacs for SAS, vs 7.3 Lacs for SPSS professionals.
- Python gets highest pay of 11.3 Lacs compared to R, SAS and SPSS.
Salary Trends across Cities:
- This year has seen an almost 15% increase in pay for Mumbai, from an average analytics salary of 9.9 Lacs last year, it has increased to 11.4 Lacs.
- This is closely followed by Bangalore with 10.3 Lacs salary, and a 5% increase from last year.
- The third runner up is Delhi-NCR, where the salaries of analytics professionals have increased from 9.4 Lacs to 9.9 Lacs. However, percentage wise, it ties with Bangalore as, it is also a 5% increase in one year.
- In the 6-10 Lacs bracket, Bangalore leads the pack with 26% earning within this bracket, followed closely by Pune and Hyderabad.
- In the 0-6 Lacs bracket, Hyderabad dominates with 46% of analytics professionals earning below 6 Lacs followed closely by Pune at 42%.
Salary Trend For Skills Across Cities:
- Mumbai tends to pay the highest across all skills.
- For predictive modeling / Advanced analytics, Delhi/ NCR has higher pay scales than Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai, but for Data Mining, Pune pays higher than Chennai & Hyderabad while Bangalore and Mumbai have a tie for Big Data.
Salary trends across Experience levels:
- At entry level, almost 81% of analytics professionals are under the 0-6 Lacs salary bracket with an average salary of 4.1 Lacs.
- The salaries of analytics professionals increase by more than 50% for each level increase in their designation. From senior analyst to manager, the jump is more than 60% on average.
- The senior analytics professionals, with more than 12 years of experience can command an average of 24 Lacs as their salary.
Salary trends across Company Type:
- There is no difference in average analytics salaries for consulting firms, domestic players or captive centers. The analytics professionals in either of these spheres get up to 12 Lacs on average.
- However, Boutique analytics firms pay the lowest – an average of 7.9 Lacs, while large IT players pay 9.5 Lacs.
- Nonetheless, analytics industry still falls in the higher paying bracket compared to other industries such as telecom, e-commerce, manufacturing, advertising, media, etc.
Conclusion
Analytics is the driving force for meaningful insights that lead to better decisions. When open-source platforms like R and Python are rapidly increasing the adoption of advance analytics, the Big Data platforms like Hadoop & Spark are revolutionizing our ability to gain valuable insights from the huge treasure chest of raw data.
India, being a KPO hub, is at the helm of this evolution, and new skills requirements are coming up every day thereby increasing the training demand from organizations and professionals who need to up-skill and keep themselves updated. This change is not limited to new tools and techniques, but many new job roles within Analytics have emerged, in addition to the conventional business analytics roles, like Data Visualization Analysts, Big Data Analysts, Data Scientists, and Data Engineers.
Thus, on one side, there is tremendous growth opportunity as this industry is moving ahead, and on the other side, the rapidly growing and ever changing industry requirements mean that professionals have to learn new skills and stay abreast of new age job requirements, if they want to stay stronger and longer in the game.
In the near future, as salaries continue to increase, we may see professionals from other sectors honing their analytics skills and switching careers. In this regards, this report hopes to present itself as a benchmark for the analytics salary ecosystem in India.
