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FORTUNE It would be tough to find a better illustration of the acute need for big-data skills today
than the situation KeyCorp KEY has been experiencing. Over the past year or so, big-data positions
there have been taking twice as long to fill as other professional roles have, said Amy Brady, the
companys chief information officer 100 to 120 days on average, rather than 55 to 60.
Those skills are incredibly hard to find, Brady said. We have examples in our risk analytics and
quantitative groups of roles that have been open for a long time.
Mike Durney, president and CEO of Dice Holdings, which publishes the information technology
careers site Dice.com, painted a similar picture.
There is a shortage, Durney said. I think its driven by a couple of things. One, so many companies
are looking to fill these needs at the same time. Everybody is trying to do something with their data.
The other piece is, you just dont have the build-up of supply, partly because the demand has
increased Data Management so rapidly.
There are an average of 1,894 big-data jobs posted on Dice on any given day, Dice spokeswoman
Rachel Ceccarelli said. Thats up 41 percent year on year; two years ago, only 438 such jobs were
listed.
MORE: How a scrappy young startup plans to turn the massive database market on its ear
In 2012, the market research firm Gartner predicted that 4.4 million IT jobs would be created
globally to support big data by 2015, including 1.9 million IT jobs in the United States.
How those jobs would be filled, however, wasnt entirely clear. Until recently, big-data education
programs were few and far between. In the last few years, graduate, undergraduate, and
professional-education programs have begun popping up to address this gaping need. Now that
theyve begun to emerge, the demand is considerable.
There has been tremendous interest, said Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Sloan
http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Maginfo-Interview-Questions-E683296.htm School of
Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along with professor Sandy Pentland,
Brynjolfsson will be teaching an executive education course this summer entitled, Big Data: Making
Complex Things Simpler. Pentland said a recent MIT course on big data, offered through the online
education service edX, had super-fast sign-up 1,000 people per day.
We have more data than ever, Brynjolfsson said, but understanding how to apply it to solve business
problems needs creativity and also a special kind of person. Neither the pure geeks nor the pure
suits have what it takes, he said. We need people with a little bit of each.
Tech industry involvement
MITs big-data education programs have involved numerous partners in the technology industry,
including IBM IBM, which began its involvement in big data education about four years ago. IBM
revealed to Fortune that it plans to expand its academic partnership program by launching new
academic programs and new curricula with more than twenty business schools and universities, to
While much of the focus so far has been on graduate programs, were excited about IBMs focus on
undergrad programs, she said. We dont need all Ph.Ds. Theres also a need for entry-level people that
you can grow in your own organization the undergraduate part is critical to the sustainability of this
model.
In fact, Id encourage all students in any field to have some kind of data-analytic coursework by the
time they graduate, Brady added.
Of course, industry players like IBM stand to benefit as well and not just on the hiring end, Dices
Durney said. There is opportunity for companies to get behind it and push it, and that helps give it
momentum, he said.
Spohrer said that IBM sees its educational outreach around big data as an enormous business
opportunity to help us grow and help our customers.
I like to say [that] the best way to predict the future is to inspire the next generation of students to
build it better, he said. Give them the opportunity to invent the next transformation.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/05/27/educating-the-big-data-generation/