How the skills shortage is transforming big data

In the early days of computing, developers were often jacks of all trades, handling virtually any task needed for software to get made. As the field matured, jobs grew more specialized. Now we’re seeing a similar pattern in a brand-new domain: big data.

That’s according to P.K. Agarwal, regional dean and CEO of Northeastern University’s recently formed Silicon Valley campus, who says big data professionals so far have commonly handled everything from data cleaning to analytics, and from Hadoop to Apache Spark.

“It’s like medicine,” said Agarwal, who at one time was California’s CTO under former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. “You start to get specialties.”

That brings us to today’s data-scientist shortage. Highly trained data scientists are now in acute demand as organizations awash in data look for meaning in all those petabytes. In part as a response to this, other professionals are learning the skills to answer at least some of those questions for themselves, earning the informal title of citizen data scientist.