Job Market for Data Science and Big Data in East Africa

Abstract

Nowadays big data have been impacting the working culture and working environment of business organizations worldwide. Big data has become an important asset of the business. The main reason is that the insights have been obtained from these data to enable organizations to be better competent in the market. Thus, those organizations using big data for informed decision-making are better benefited than the organizations that are not using it.  However, the job role of data science and big data as well as the skills required for the position is not well-identified and distinguished. These issues are the main current challenges in the job market for big data and data science to get the right skilled manpower for the required position. This raises the need for appropriate categories of job positions and skills required to use the data effectively and efficiently for smart decisions and strategic planning in business organizations. The purpose of this study is two-fold. The first is to identify the job market/job position for data science and big data professions. The second is to list out skills required for these job positions in the job market. Data that relate to big data and data science from job advertising posts are collected from online job-related websites and categorized into clusters of job positions. The clustering task is based on the analysis of some commonalities as well as differences observed in the professions. Besides skills required have been identified and listed. The findings show that data scientists, data analysts, and data engineers are identified as popular career paths for the required job market with the required skills in East Africa. As a concluding remark, this research underscores the importance of establishing appropriate job categories and skill sets to effectively leverage big data for informed decision-making and strategic planning within business organizations.