Data jobs in the US

A mini analysis

Disclaimer: This blog post is written as part of a Udacity project for Data Scientist Nanodegree. Accompanying code and README.md can be found here.

Let’s say you’re looking to switch fields, and want to move towards data. Where will you go to find your job? Which subfields pays best and will your industry experience help?

Where to go?

I calculated geographical hotspots using this highly impractical way:
1. Convert place names to latitude and longitude (actually practical)
2. Determine in which grid cell the coordinate would fall
3. Create a 24 by 16 grid heatmap to show the job hotspots

US data jobs heatmap

That is not the best way to visualize hotspots on a map, but it’s a fun way. Check out the notebook for the NumPy code here. Also *clearly* the south-west coast and NYC and south-central and ehm… Chicago?… are the best spots to find data jobs.

We could, of course, create a visualisation that at least preserves the coordinate values, so the axes might give us a little help, let’s do that.

Scatterplot of US data jobs

Yeah, I’m pretty sure now that’s Chicago showing up, my geographical gut-feeling never fails me.

So now you know where to go, let’s figure out what to do:

What is the best paying data job?

Have a look at these box plots:

Boxplots of salaries for each job title

The axes labels are a bit messed up, but that’s not a problem, we’re here for the data, not for the prettiness of the labels. Also, we excluded job titles that had fewer than 30 listings, we don’t want to compare 100-or-so boxplots backed by too few data.

Anyways, Business Systems Analyst is the clear winner with an average salary of $109 263.57. It also beats the other job titles by salary for every quartile, so you’re good either way. It’s also the 3rd most common job in the set:

Business Analyst                 518
Data Analyst                     150
Business Systems Analyst         129

So that’s good news: great pay and plenty available!

Which industry to go to?

Last but not least, which industry will increase your odds? In other words, which industry is looking for data people?

IT Services                     659
Unspecified                     524
Staffing & Outsourcing          510
Computer Hardware & Software    245
Consulting                      235

The top 5 shows IT Services ranked 1, so that should be your go-to when looking for a data job.

Code and more

Interested in how I found out about all these great things? Check the GitHub repo.