This article is originally part of our Analytics India Salary Study 2017
The value of analytics was recognized by various business enterprises in a very short spur of time. This sudden change led to a paucity of analytics professionals who could cater to the analytical needs of so many different industries. This has been promising news for the job seekers and analytics aspirants. Also, since the value added by analytics to a business is no secret, it is somewhat obligatory for companies to compete for talent and bring in the best with the most lucrative offer.
This has been one of the driving factors to not only differentiate the salaries of analytics professionals when it comes to comparing to other professions, but the growth promised in this field is also one of the highest. This is especially true when we compare analytics to other knowledge-based industries job roles namely Primary Research, Secondary Research, Financial Research and Information Technology. On average, analytics professionals receive around 30% higher salaries than these other job roles in India. Amongst these other job roles, Primary research roles earn the highest average salary (INR 9.03 Lacs) as compared to the analytics job roles where the average salary is INR 11.7 Lacs.
Apart from the pecuniary benefits, let’s also see some of the other factors which attract the talent to analytics:
- More involvement on the business side of the things. All analytics projects, invariably begin with a specific business objective in the sight. A key success driver for any analytics projects is detailed scoping of the business requirements along with good understanding of the business constraints, which is essential for the actionable outcomes. This ensures that Analytics professionals work in tandem with business teams and constantly learn about the new developments, thereby making the whole experience more engrossing and enriching.
- Exposure to a wide variety of problems and industries. Generally, an analytics professionals – working with a consulting firm or an analytics service providers – do get opportunities to work on variety of business problems and in various domains like, but not limited to, Banking, Financial Services, E-commerce and Retail, Telecom, Hospitality, etc However, this is seldom the case with other career options. This also translates to better exposure and more variety at work and hence builds cross-industry capabilities. All this makes Analytics work profiles intellectually more stimulating.
- The pace of development of new algorithms has been quite rapid in the past couple of years for this relatively new analytics industry. Analytics professionals are constantly on a learning path exploring new analytics tools and techniques coming up in the market and evaluating it for their current job roles. This is a big factor to attract some of the brightest minds available in the workforce who get a playground to innovate on the methodologies and tailor it to meet their business challenges.
If we look at the Indian analytics market, there are broadly three kinds of analytics entities that are present. Analytics service providers– which take outsourced analytics assignments from industrial clients, both within and outside India. Captives– Offshore analytics teams of various international companies but based out of India. This also includes the analytics teams present within all consulting firms, which use analytics extensively for their clients. Domestic in-house analytics teams set up by domestic companies to help meet their analytics requirements
We may conjecture from the above, while analytics is the most nascent and yet-to-mature field as compared to other knowledge disciplines, but still, it has created the new jobs at the highest rate in various sizes and types of companies in recent times. With the promising career growth available in analytics, many professionals today are willing to make a career shift even at parallel compensations, in the beginning, to ultimately attain better growth later on and well-rounded professional development. The findings from this year’s salary report further establish this idea more firmly!
