Whether you’re a veteran IT manager looking to jumpstart your career, a young IT pro who wants to advance to the next great opportunity or an executive on the business side who wants to help the company optimize its business intelligence (BI) capabilities, all roads lead to big data.
By every measure, big data is the fastest growing area within IT. The big data job category has the most job openings, the top salary and the highest job satisfaction ratings. Specific job titles within the broad big data category include data scientist, data architect and data engineer.
Companies are turning to big data analytics to draw actionable business intelligence out of the vast trove of data that enterprises have historically collected and continue to collect on a daily basis. Big data analytics is applicable in virtually every industry, from a manufacturer using IoT sensor data to predict when a specific motor on the plant floor is about to fail, to a healthcare organization aggregating information on tens of thousands of patients to spot patterns and identify effective treatment plans.
And if you’re in IT and taking the long view in terms of your career path, the big data explosion shows no signs of slowing down, driven by the proliferation of IoT sensors in both enterprise and consumer settings. Anytime you hear the word “smart” in reference to a city, a home, a factory, a hospital and so on you’re really talking about big data. Gartner predicts that there will be 20 billion IoT devices deployed by 2020.
IDG
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On the other hand, two powerful trends within IT – cloud computing and automation – are making other IT jobs increasingly obsolete. If you’re a server admin in a company moving its application portfolio to the cloud, or a help desk expert in a company installing automated chat bots, you might want to think about transitioning into big data.
The key to snagging a big data job is obtaining a big data-related certification to demonstrate that you have the requisite skills. According to a recent survey of 730 certified professionals conducted by Certification Magazine, 52 percent of survey respondents said they got a raise within a year of completing a big data certification and 64 percent said the raise was 4 percent or more. In addition, 75 percent of respondents said they received bonuses related to big data certification. And certifications aren’t a one-and-done thing. Nearly 40 percent of respondents said they had two or more active big data certifications.