Top 5 Up and Coming Big Data Jobs of 2016

Big data has been all the rage in the past few years. In 2012, the Harvard Business Review described data science as the sexiest job of the 21st century, and big data has only grown bigger since then. Whether its location tracking or mapping customer behavior across a website, there are numerous job opportunities within big data for those who like numbers. With the explosion of the Internet of Things and machine learning, the growth of big data jobs will continue in the coming years.

By 2020, businesses utilizing data will boost their productivity by $430 billion in comparison to the competition that does not use big data. As a result, there are all kinds of jobs that are in high demand today to help businesses increase their efficiency and more effectively target customers. Here are the top 4 up-and-coming big data jobs of 2016.

1. Data Analyst

This ones a bit of a no-brainer, but big data cant help a business unless they have the resources to process that data and extract meaningful trends that they can act on. Its the data analysts job to wrangle all of the data and provide a company with conclusions on what the data is saying. Sure, companies like Microsoft and Salesforce are providing analytics options for businesses who dont have the data analysts to do it in-house, but ultimately, those tools wont provide the same breadth of insight that a dedicated professional can. This means that data analysts will have a steady line of work for years to come.

2. Data Security Engineer

With great data comes great responsibility. A huge amount of data is produced by consumers themselves, and much of that data is personal. Not only would a hacker releasing consumer data be a hit to a businesss public relations and severely reduce their customers trust, but keeping that data internal is also important to keep a leg up on your competition. Big data is a potential treasure trove of information on your audience, and that means this data could help your competitor too. As businesses strive to increase their ability to boost profits through big data, they will also be working hard to prevent that personalized data from being exposed in a leak. A data security analysts job is never done.

3. UX Designer

While UX designers arent normally associated with big data, UX design and big data actually need each other, and ones success is dependent on the other. On one hand, UX designers can create visualizations of big data to help analysts pull information out of huge amounts of numbers. UX designers can also customize dashboards for companies to tailor the way they analyze the data. On the other hand, big data has a huge influence on UX designs success. For example, creating a heat map of where a visitors mouse moves on a website and what they click can reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the sites UX design. Because UX design is so intertwined with big data, its safe to say that the UX designers job will be in increasingly high demand as big data continues to grow.

4. Data Security Engineer

With great data comes great responsibility. A huge amount of data is produced by consumers themselves, and much of that data is personal. Not only would a hacker releasing consumer data be a hit to a businesss public relations and severely reduce their customers trust, but keeping that data internal is also important to keep a leg up on your competition. Big data is a potential treasure trove of information on your audience, and that means this data could help your competitor too. As businesses strive to increase their ability to boost profits through big data, they will also be working hard to prevent that personalized data from being exposed in a leak. A data security analysts job is never done.

5. Machine Learning Engineer

The mechanics of machine learning are complicated, and we are just now entering a point of technological development where machine learning is becoming useful. Part of this rise is caused by the fact that big data greatly improves machine learning by feeding the machine algorithm the huge quantities of information required to teach it. In the coming years, more businesses will be hiring machine learning engineers to help automate actions within the business. Whether its creating recommendation engines based on past behavior or optimizing travel routes based on aggregated traffic data, machine learning engineers will be improving businesses around the world by building algorithms to sift through the vast quantities of big data.

What other jobs in the big data industry will be growing in 2016? Leave a comment below!