The increasing impact of COVID pandemic has tremendously created the worst recession and economic crisis of all time. Economists believe that India is going to face the worst possible recession in 40 years, where thousands are and will be losing jobs due to the massive impact of the pandemic lockdown.

That being said, despite lockdown and the impactful recession, there are a few specific domains across the IT spaces that have continued to augment at a steady pace. One of the critical fields out of the lot is data analytics, which has not only gained new impetus but also added value in lessening the impact of the pandemic among various industries.

A recent Analytics India Magazine study has revealed that open jobs in data analytics skills have the highest proportion at 33.7%, surpassing machine learning and cybersecurity. A lot of this could be attributed to the trend of utilising data to develop new business models and products amid these uncertain times. This has urged companies to have a constant demand for data analytics professionals regardless of the economic situations and their financial conditions. As of today, there are 97,131 data analytics open jobs advertised across all industries in India.

Open job distribution by skills and role types. Data analytics jobs have the highest proportion at 33.7%, which is followed by machine learning with 20.4% and cybersecurity with 15.4%

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Data Analytics Dominates Open Jobs

Before COVID pandemic era, the data analytics domain significantly experienced tremendous growth — in 2019-20. In fact, previous studies highlighted how the space of analytics is growing at a massive rate in terms of revenue, investments and salaries. According to numbers, the functions of analytics in India had earned a total revenue of $35.9 billion which is a 19.5% growth from the previous year. A lot of this could be attributed to rising demand for analytical services among sectors like BFSI, marketing, eCommerce, healthcare, media as well as telecom industries.

However, the advent of lockdown brought in a massive downturn for the majority of the industries but the IT space, which continued to develop at a steady pace. While data analytics has seen significant growth before the lockdown, analysing data for making business decisions has continued to be an essential requirement even during and after lockdown. Explained by the fact that data is continuously being generated across various mediums for different segments, and this data is not only required in the pre-COVID era but also during the recession.

As that happens, most of the large IT companies, along with medium-size IT companies including TCS, Accenture, Capgemini and Cognizant have also started offering end-to-end analytical services. This, in turn, has raised the requirement of hiring more data science and analytics professionals for organisations. 

Apart from data analytics, some other critical functional areas that showed resilience against recession are cloud computing, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and deep learning. While machine learning holds around 20% of the open jobs, cybersecurity takes up approximately 15% of the market. Remaining AI, deep learning, IoT as well as blockchain have lower proportions in the entire open jobs pool.

Additionally, this rise in demand for data analytics jobs is also due to the high salary that the space is willing to offer the professionals. According to the AIM research, the median salaries offered to AI professionals for open jobs have turned out to be the highest at ₹12.1 lakhs. But, despite having a drop from last year, the data analytics space offers a significantly high median salary of ₹9.9 lakhs. The decline in salary margin, compared to the median salaries already being drawn by professionals, is because of the financial turmoil of many companies, halting many of their operations and services.

Coming to the skill development opportunities in data analytics, the research stated that salary distribution and experience level required for the data analytics open jobs have the highest proportion. This highlights many job opportunities for recent graduates as well as experienced professionals of the field.

Data is currently the almighty to survive this pandemic; and with it being generated across industries like healthcare, BFSI, eCommerce as well as electronics, numerous job opportunities have become apparent for experienced professionals. According to numbers, considering the security of end-to-end operations has always been the key concern. Therefore, the role of risk analysts will see the maximum growth of 10.1% annually, along with other analytical roles like IoT analysts.

Also Read: Are Analytics Jobs Recession-Proof? Here’s What Data Scientists Think

Wrapping Up

With the pointers mentioned above, it can be established that despite the unfortunate pandemic, the demand for data analytics jobs roles has remained resilient, in fact, continuing to look up. This is not only because of the immense data that is generated due to the shift towards digitisation, but also the salaries that are offered for these roles.