Tell Your Kids to be Data Scientists – Not Doctors

Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed by John Phillips at CNBC about our data scientist salary study. His article, Why Your Kids Will Want to be Data Scientists, was published at the end of May, and in it he raised a very interesting point:

“According to Burtch Works’ 2014 study of salaries for data scientists… those responsible for a team of 1-3 earn [a median salary of] $140,000 and those responsible for a team of 10 or more earn $232,500.

By contrast, the mean average annual income for a lawyer in America was $131,990 in 2013, while doctors earned $183,940, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

Did you hear that? Data scientists earning more than doctors! For complete salary information for data scientists, Big Data professionals and market research professionals, download the full reports for free here. Salary is not the only reason however, that I would recommend encouraging your children to pursue statistics and coding over going to medical school.

How Data Scientists Are Supplementing Doctors

There are big changes happening in healthcare right now, and the implementation of EHR (electronic health records) in particular is a great example of how data scientists will be working with doctors in the future. The move to EHR is picking up steam, and the Center for Disease Control reports that 78% of office-based doctors are using EHR as of 2013, with that number only expected to grow as practices will face penalties for non-compliance. All of these electronic patient records spell out Big Data for the healthcare fields, and data scientists - like all quantitative folks - love data. These medical data could not only offer tremendous insights that change the face of modern medicine, but also offer rewarding opportunities to the data scientists who must decipher the data.

Patient care also stands to receive enormous benefits from data science. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla was recently quoted at the Standford University School of Medicine’s Big Data in Biomedicine conference saying, “Humans are not good when 500 variables affect a disease. We are guided too much by opinions, not by statistical science.” While a doctor may be trained to look for many factors when diagnosing an ailment, some of these diseases are impossibly complex, and patients could stand to gain faster, safer treatment if left in the hands of a well-developed machine, or even a physician aided by one. For example, IBM’s Watson is already collaborating with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to help doctors make better cancer treatment choices. The human interaction between patient and physician will continue to be important, but data scientists will have a measurable impact on the future of healthcare.

Career of the Future

One of my predictions for the analytics hiring market this year was that data scientists would be embedded in analytics groups, and with the internet of things, the increase in wearables, social media sentiment analysis and many more applications for data science, it’s no wonder this career has so much buzz around it. With the increase in demand, shortage of talent, high salaries and applications in every industry, data science is becoming a good option for career success. The road to that success begins with a strong early foundation in math, and (perhaps) some nudging from the parents. I can’t tell you how excited I was when my daughter, Becky (who started college this year at Macalester), changed her major to math, as I believe strongly that this is a career path that offers a bright future. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll have a data scientist in the family!

State of the Marketing Research Hiring Market 2014

As part of my guest blogger series, the Burtch Works marketing research team, Karla Ahern and Naomi Keller, will be sharing some of their articles previously published in AMA magazine. In April Karla and Naomi published the following article on the state of the market, who's hiring, and which skills researchers need to stay competitive. You can also check out a video on the AMA site with highlights from the article.

State of the Market 2014

Last summer, we looked closely at trends in market research hiring as the economy moved towards recovery. At that time, we were beginning to see steady growth in job availability as well as a renewed sense of urgency within the marketplace. As more jobs became available, candidates were going on and off the market more quickly, often interviewing and fielding offers from multiple companies. As a result, hiring authorities recognized the need to act fast to snag the best employees and critically evaluate their compensation packages. Most of this activity was happening on the client side in the pharmaceutical, technology and retail industries. In 2014, we’re seeing this growth and urgency continue with some interesting new trends.

First off, we’d be remiss not to address the few rough patches in the landscape. As the economy continues to recover, retail and restaurants have been slow to return. The difficult winter has not helped these industries and some well-known companies have begun taking a hard look at headcount.  Additionally, some CPG companies are seeing declines in market share, potentially due to consumer adoption of high quality, lower priced private label brands. However, in the field of market research, consumer behavioral changes inherently represent great opportunities for growth, and investment in research will always illuminate the best strategies to address these changes.

In our conversations with clients this year, a frequent talking point has been their recommitment to the expansion of consumer insights departments. This is great news for the industry as a whole, whether you work on the client or supplier side. Reinvestment in research should ripple throughout the industry and if corporate entities lead the charge, we’ll likely see suppliers and consultants staff up to meet the increased demand. So far, we’re seeing a split as departments expand; some are pulling their research more in-house while others are broadening their research capacity while continuing to outsource to vendors.

As a result of this growth, we’re also starting to see more Director-level roles open up. Last year the majority of openings were at the Manager to Senior Manager-level, but as companies commit to expanding their insights teams, they want experienced market researchers at the helm to guide long-term strategy and growth, and in some cases, help build a consumer insights function from scratch. This trend should prove beneficial for both junior and senior level candidates because as employees move up or out, roles will be back filled, allowing career mobility for junior and mid-level employees.

The expansion of consumer insights teams and the increase in Director level roles appears to also be contributing to an increased need for candidates with direct management experience. From manager roles upward, many of our clients are telling us that they want employees with demonstrated leadership success. Job seekers should be sure to highlight these skills on their resume and during interviews in order to stay competitive. For candidates without direct reports, we recommend emphasizing vendor management and project management experience if applicable.

After the long winter, the signs of continued job growth are clear and confidence is returning to companies and candidates. For those who were waiting out the economic slowdown, now may be a good time to start exploring the market. Even those who aren’t looking for a career change can benefit from understanding how the landscape is changing and how these new trends will affect their current role and their career overall. And as always, a conversation with your specialized recruiter is a great place to start.

Job Market Explodes For Quantitative Students

With the market for quantitative candidates continuing to gain momentum, Burtch Works spoke with Jennifer Priestley, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Kennesaw State University - and friend of Burtch Works - about the job market for quantitative students, the  beginnings of her MS in Applied Statistics program, and her thoughts on SAS vs. R.

Burtch Works: Tell me about the makeup of your class, do you find that many of your students are coming straight from undergrad or mid-career and retraining?

Jennifer Priestley: I would say 40% of our students come in direct from undergrad; the other 60% are coming in with work experience, and are doing a mid-career change. What’s fascinating to me is that we’re getting increasing numbers of MBA’s. For a long time, an MBA would suffice, and it almost didn’t matter where it came from, but those days are over. Maybe from the top five programs they still matter, but for the most part an MBA is a way to round out qualifications. It would be naïve to think that an undergrad degree in business and an MBA will get you somewhere.

BW: I’ve heard similar things from other programs about the influx of MBA students. Do you get many international students in your program?

JP: Some, but not as many as I’ve heard in other programs. Many of the students are first generation college students, so upon taking their first course here they will be the most educated in their family. Our students are motivated, driven, and hungry for success. We have a 0% unemployment rate, and when these undergraduate students are placed into white collar, professional jobs making $50,000 a year, they’ll be making more money than their parents. That’s what inspires me to do this, because you’ve fundamentally changed their path and lineage. They may start their education at X County Comprehensive High School, where only 3% of students even go to college at all, and by the time they graduate our program they’re working as a business analyst at Equifax. That’s a huge step.

BW: Can you elaborate on how the Master’s program came about? When did it start, and how did you choose what to include in the program?

JP: It launched in 2006. When we started, we looked hard at what other universities in the regional footprint were doing. We didn’t want to go head to head with Georgia Tech, University of Georgia, or Emory. We wanted to do something in statistics that didn’t compete with them, since we didn’t want to be competitive - we wanted to be complementary.’ So we started with a blank sheet of paper, and created our program to fill the gap. We wanted to build the program so that our students could graduate, and the next day walk into a Fortune 500 company and add value. The entire curriculum was SAS based, and programming in base SAS. We also stress the importance of learning how to extract, transport, load (ETL) and cleanse your own data. Statisticians don’t have the luxury of being a “data diva”.

Statisticians can’t just create models; they have to do computer science. The days of getting pristine data sets are long gone, so students need to know how to do these things. Basically, we were teaching data science before it was cool. In our program, students spend weeks in some classes just cleaning data before they learn the modeling techniques. We recognized a gap in the current education system, and combined the idea of ETL and cleaning with the mathematics and the statistics.

BW: What are some of the other challenges that your program aims to prepare students for?

JP: A big point in our class is communication skills. Nobody cares what you did if it is so complex that you can’t translate it. If you can’t explain what you did to a marketing major, then you can’t improve the decision making process, and you may need to consider hanging it up. The people who are going to take your stuff and do something with it are on the business side. As you move up the chain, you will have 5 minutes to explain what you’ve found to a c-suite executive who doesn’t care about your incredible skills, they just care about how it will profit the organization and affect the bottom line. You need to be able to convert the results into something meaningful, and if you can’t then it will reflect on you as a professional.

BW: How has the career outlook for your students changed over the past 3-5 years?

Exploded. Completely exploded. Like I said, we have a 0% unemployment rate. Companies will contact me, saying “Can you send us resumes for your students? We’re trying to hire for internships.” The press says there are no internships out there, but we actually don’t have enough students to place. When we launched in 2006, and basically we didn’t know, ‘if we built it would they come’. But, we graduated our first cohort in 2008, and they did well. I would say starting salaries in the $60,000-70,000 range, which is not bad. Now, we place kids in the $90,000 to six-figure range, so an amazing increase in salaries.

Another indication is the number of applicants that come to us. When we started the program we kind of said whomever wants to apply, we’ll let them all in. Now? We have so many applicants that we receive four applications for every slot. We also took the GRE requirements way up. Up until last year they had to be above the median for us to look at the application, and now they must be in the 75^th percentile for us to consider the application. Keep in mind, as I said, we don’t have that many international students.

BW: So I’ve been hearing a lot about SAS Day at KSU, and it seems like a fascinating concept. When did that start, and how has it evolved over the past few years?

JP: It started in 2007. We work very closely with SAS Institute, so the year after we launched the program I got a call from a sales representative for SAS. He does business development for Fortune 500’s like Delta Airlines, Equifax, all companies in the region, and he said to me, “I’m always challenged with, once they get a multi-million dollar infrastructure with SAS, the next question is always: How do I find people to run it?” It’s easy to find someone with 5+ years of SAS experience for $200,000. What’s harder is finding someone with 2-3 years experience for $50,000-100,000. He said, “You have a natural pool of talent, and we have a built-in demand from companies.”

It eventually evolved into what we have now, where the first half of the event is the student poster competition, with students creating a poster for a SAS-based project, and the alumni come back and judge. We probably had 70 posters last year. We look for the perfect intersection of correct math and an elegant, efficient, and visually appealing presentation. Students set up a booth, and companies can visit the students and drop off their business cards. It’s basically a reverse career fair.

BW: What kind of companies go to SAS Day, and how many of them?

JP: Of the 200 or so people who came last year, I’d say there were about 50-70 different companies represented. Companies like Autotrader, Deloitte, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Equifax, KPMG, Coca-Cola, The Southern Company, Maxum Insurance, Teradata, CarMax, State Farm, Aspen Consulting, Midtown Consulting Group, Slalom Consulting, and AT&T.

BW: Do you have any examples of other schools that do this? Is this a common thing?

JP: SAS had said they wanted to partner with other schools, and I’ve heard of similar events at Texas A&M, UConn, and University of Illinois. I know University of Alabama has something similar, like a Data Analytics Week that’s aligned with the business school.

BW: What do you think of the popular debate about SAS vs. R?

JP: It’s not even a debate. We don’t see SAS and R as competition. They’re complimentary, and a lot of companies use both. Although we partner with SAS, we still teach both programs. I’d say we’re 70-80% SAS dominant, but we teach R also, and we encourage our students to know both. That’s our philosophy. We’ve actually had an R Day also for 2 years now; the next one will be in the fall.

I would say the results of your survey, 65% SAS and 35% R, is a perfect example of what we use.

My Predictions for the 2014 Analytics Hiring Market

Thanks in part to the media coverage of Big Data, analytics has become inescapable. To those who have worked in and around this industry for years this information is nothing new - merely more visible. Every day I’m hearing about more and more businesses warming to the idea that there are actionable insights readily available in their data if they know how to use it.

It is an exciting time to be a statistician, data scientist, or analytics professional, and if you thought 2013 was big, 2014 promises to be even bigger. Without further ado, here are my top predictions for the analytics hiring market:

1.)  Real-time analytics becomes increasingly important to business intelligence – Industries like the gaming industry already give their customers incentives in real-time and retailers are quickly moving toward real-time couponing. Those of you with real-time data experience will be in high-demand for these growing roles.

2.) Data scientists will be embedded in analytics groups – In addition to analysts who can build complex models, there will be an increasing need for data scientists, who with their background in analytics and computer science can wrangle massive, unstructured data sets. Companies hoping to extract the full benefit from their data sets will need a combination of both groups.

3.) If you don’t have digital you will be a dinosaur! - If your skill set doesn’t already include digital analytics your career plan should be to get experience and soon. Without it your skills will become outdated and obsolete.

4.) Sentiment analysis will continue to erode traditional survey methods – Use of social media data and other “free sources” has the opportunity to overtake traditional survey methods, which will impact the marketing research talent landscape.

5.)  Corporations will bring on internal staff to replace high paid consultants- Consultants got the ball rolling, and now companies will seek to take on full time staff.

6.) However, this will not adversely affect the consulting industry – Demand is so high for analytics experts (and continuing to grow) that there will still be companies looking to small and large consulting firms. Despite some companies hiring full time staff, the consulting industry will continue to experience growth. Heavy travel schedules will continue to be the norm for these opportunities.

7.) The trend towards wearables and PEDs will create new positions- If the buzz from CES2014 is to be believed, the wearables trend is increasing. As with any new technology that creates massive amounts of data, analytics positions will be created in the industry to make sense of and capitalize on all that information.

8.) Startups’ grip on the hiring market will loosen- I have spoken with candidates who have worked with many failed startups, and I think that this year the tendency towards hopping from failed startup to failed startup will begin to shake out. Candidates who have been through the failed startup cycle will begin to realize that to build a career it will be important to learn from an established group.

9.) Graduates from the new analytics programs will begin to hit the job market - This is not so much a prediction as it is inevitable, and I am very interested to see how well these new programs have prepared their students to enter the quantitative workforce.

What trends do you think we will see in the analytics hiring market? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

 

 

Career Advice and Trends for Marketing Research Professionals

As part of my guest blogger series, the Burtch Works marketing research team, Karla Ahern and Naomi Keller, will be sharing some of their articles previously published in AMA magazine. In the June 2013 issue Karla and Naomi published the article below about hiring trends they are seeing in the field, as well as career advice for marketing research professionals. They also recently released The Burtch Works Study: Salaries for Marketing Research Professionals, which looks at salary information and how it varies by geography, education, industry, career level and more. Prior to joining Burtch Works, Karla and Naomi worked in client services, account management and business development roles at research firms including GfK, Ipsos and IRI.

Career Advice for Researchers

When we think about the signs of healthy economy activity and recovery from the recession, it’s all too tempting to have tunnel vision in lieu of reports that claim that companies are still cautious on the hiring front. But when you look at businesses’ day-to-day hiring practices, there is no denying that a sense of urgency is returning to the market.

In the past months and years, our team that recruits for professionals in market research witnessed the frustrating trend of human resources and hiring managers failing to move quickly enough. It was not uncommon to interview for months only to wait even longer for a final decision and offer to be made. Companies wanted to make sure that the worker they hired was fully committed for fear that she was only making a move for shortsighted reasons or out of desperation after a layoff. But the tides appear to be turning. Hiring authorities are finally starting to realize that if they sit around waiting for an impossibly perfect candidate, or if they drag their feet during the interview process, candidates have no problem going somewhere else.

A Different Sort of Recovery

Rest assured that economic recovery is happening. It’s not the same kind of bounce-back that we may have seen in past recessions, but we’re witnessing a slow and sure positive change as companies look to increase headcount in market research. Most notably, we have seen increased needs in the pharmaceutical, technology and retail industries, mostly at the middle to senior level. Big-name firms never used to have a problem attracting top-grade talent to join their teams, but times are changing.

The good candidates are out there. If companies are having trouble hiring them, it’s because workers are being courted by multiple companies at once. As soon as a well-qualified candidate begins his job search, multiple employers may be interested. It’s interesting to note that many of these prospects are client-side opportunities as of late, suggesting that this may start to become a trend in job growth in the coming months and years.

Large CPG firms that used to be able to count on their names and reputations now are competing for candidates’ attention, as exceptional workers are weighing multiple offers and can afford to be picky with their choices. For clients, it’s important to know what they’re competing against: aggressive salaries, growing bonus potential, good career trajectory and relocation assistance, for example.

What Makes a Good Candidate

Of course, this is excellent news for market research candidates. We have noticed that those with four to eight years of experience in consumer insights are seeing a lot of activity, especially if they’ve had experience on the client or corporate side. Again, we’ve seen this sector becoming more active lately, so it’s a good indicator of what we can expect in the near future.

Candidates with an advanced degree, either a master’s degree, or an M.B.A., typically attract more attention from employers. Continuing education is always a good investment, but with today’s competitive market, giving yourself another advantage against other workers pays off. We often talk to clients looking to fill more senior positions who only want to consider candidates with the aforementioned degrees and this will only become more of a requirement for senior-level positions in the future.

Flexibility with location also is a desirable trait for candidates today. While major metropolitan areas have always been a hub for market research careers, large corporations have long had opportunities available in less-populated areas in the Midwest and Southern regions of the US. Candidates who are open to relocating are able to explore more options, and more companies are starting to offer competitive relocation assistance packages that we haven’t seen for years.

Flexibility on the title is another, sometimes more challenging, trait to find in candidates. Although workers should consider career growth and management experience in their job searches, it’s important to remember that a title isn’t everything. Your title can vary from company to company, as different employers use various internal classifications. A senior analyst at a small boutique firm means something quite different at a Fortune 500 company. Understand that when switching industries, lateral moves are sometimes necessary to gain experience in the long run.

The coming months should provide more insight into what we’ve already been seeing, namely the growth in shopping insights and client-side options. Market research was named one of the hottest jobs in 2012, and we have no doubt that 2013 and 2014 are sure to follow suit.