Can Recession Impact Your Big Data Career in 2022?

The COVID-19 outbreak had created havoc with the normal routine of the world, created economic disruptions, brought the entire world to a halt. The effect was visible from the streets of China – where the outbreak originated – to Western countries where millions were forced to live in a state of partial house arrest, and the engines that kept the global economy high up came to an abrupt freeze.

The negative impact of COVID-19 on the economies not only in the US but also in the other parts of the world has resulted in soaring rates of unemployment. With the kind of economic disruptions that the world is experiencing in the present time, it is not surprising to say that numerous countries may experience impending recession that may put further damper to the growing discontent in the global market.

The question the experts are worried about globally is whether there will be a slowdown in the demand for data science professionals and what will it spell for your Big Data career?

Interestingly the demand for data science professionals and data analytics professionals can’t slowdown because despite the economy heading for recession, there has been no slowdown in the data that is generated across the world.

Not forgetting the report by IBM in 2017, where it was predicted that the number of analytics and data science jobs will see a significance surge in the US alone from 364,000 to approximately 2, 729, 000 by this year i.e. 2020. 

Another report by LinkedIn in 2019 had ranked ‘data scientist’ as the No 1 job that is most promising as well in the US and the result was based on salary prospects, career advancement opportunities, as well as the number of job openings that were at about 56% on the upper side in the sector as compared to 2018.

The rising demand for Big Data Analyst is because of the exponential growth of data along with the business’ desire to use the data for the betterment of business results.

The exponential growth of data — and industry’s desire to use that data for better business outcomes — has been widely cited as a reason for the increasing demand for analytical talent.

So now the looming question is – will the current recession slow the demand growth for analytics and data science professionals? And if the answer to this dreaded question is yes, then how you can recession-proof your big data career?

There are few things that are clear from the current scenario of the market – any decrease in demand for data analysts will spell good news for AI vendors as well as aggressive AI adopters. Will the current recession slow the growth in demand for analytics and data science? Will changes in organizational goals and focus make job losses in these fields likely? Any lessening of general demand would be good news for aggressive AI adopters and AI-focused vendors, many of which are already hiring laid-off data scientists and engineers. But for the average company, lower demand for data scientists will be a signal that less data science is going on within their organizations, meaning there will be a continued reliance on intuition and other less-powerful guides to decision-making and action.