Key Takeaways
The job market is defined by skills, not roles: As the shift in the job market accelerates, in-demand skills is the best way to measure how jobs are evolving. According to Emsi Burning Glass, the average job has seen over a third of its required skills replaced in the last 10 years.
The demand for data skills is skyrocketing: The demand for data skills has skyrocketed and will continue to grow. Moreover, data skills are invading traditional roles such as marketing and finance, leading to hybrid jobs. For example, marketing experts with SQL skills earn 40% more in salary than marketing experts with no SQL skills.
Education is key: In a world where skills are changing rapidly, organizations and modern education institutions need to adapt to a world where fast upskilling and reskilling paths is the norm.
Key Quotes
In the education system, as it exists today. I think institutions, universities, and others need to become dramatically more agile, in terms of how they track the landscape of opportunity for the graduates and build skills into their curricula, evaluate their curricula, make sure that they continue to be aligned, make sure that they are building differentiation for their graduates. But I think, more broadly, to your point, we're going to see a significant transformation in how education happens in the format and structure of education. Because right now, education is for the most part in most countries a once and done phenomenon. You go to school, you slog through it, you get your degree, and you never look back. But think about a world where a third of the skills of an average job changed in the space of 10 years.
When we look at the state of a lot of tech stacks today, they are more accessible, I might say in some cases easier to use, they're also more powerful. But what it means is that people in a broader range of backgrounds can actually leverage those skills, because you don't need a deep specialization in order to be able to use data skills using the example marketing we're talking about before. Almost 10% of the jobs that asked for data science skills, not just data skills, but data science skills, are in marketing.
About Matt Sigelman
Matt Sigelman is the Chairman of Emsi Burning Glass, a leading labor market analytics firm. For more than a decade he has led Burning Glass in harnessing the power of data and artificial intelligence in the job market. He holds an A.B. from Princeton University and an M.A. from Harvard and served previously with McKinsey & Company and Capital One.
Adel is a Data Science educator, speaker, and Evangelist at DataCamp where he has released various courses and live training on data analysis, machine learning, and data engineering. He is passionate about spreading data skills and data literacy throughout organizations and the intersection of technology and society. He has an MSc in Data Science and Business Analytics. In his free time, you can find him hanging out with his cat Louis.