The 8 Most In-Demand Big Data Roles

In today’s digital world there is no shortage of data. In fact, many times there seems to be too much. Companies are investing in cloud technologies, mobile technologies and social media. Combine that with everything else it takes to run an organization and you start to see how much data is being collected. Along with the rise of this data is an increase in demand for people who can collect, organize and make sense of it, according to recent data from Kforce, a staffing firm headquartered in Tampa, Florida.

The salaries listed here are from and are based on a typical IT professional working 40 hours a week.

With the eruption of data and the variety of data types that companies are seeking to take advantage of, there has been a significant increase in the need for professionals with the skills to acquire and integrate big data. ETL developers mainly work with different sources of data an organization may have and creates ways to extract data from sources, as well as, import it and modify it to fit the needs of the organization and then add it into a data warehouse.

“Given that the ETL software industry is rather mature, these positions are likely to have some of the longest tenures in the Big Data resource pool, and are often a mix of employees and contract resources,” says Greg Jones, CTO of Kforce.

Previously referred to as data architects who were a part of IT, the data scientist is a new breed of technology professional able to tie their data organization techniques into business value propositions. They must also have great communication skills to explain data findings to both IT leadership as well as business leaders. These data scientists typically have their own sandbox in which to explore and examine an organization’s data and help drive innovation.

“Part analyst, part artist, a data scientist is somebody who is inquisitive, who can stare at data and spot trends. It’s almost like a Renaissance individual who really wants to learn and bring change to an organization,” says Anjul Bhambhri, vice president of big data products at IBM.

“These individuals specialize in appliances such as Teradata, Neteeza and Exadata, according to Kforce. The core responsibilities associated with this role include data integration, administration and optimization of performance associated with these high end machines. These special appliances are used in an organization to provide Massive Parallel Processing (MPP), by using optimized memory, disk and data storage architectures specific to an analytics processing environment.” – Kforce’s Big Data Team