Data Science and Analytics Career Trends for 2021

Data Science is a hot topic these days! So it stands to reason that data science and analytics related careers are becoming more and more popular (So much so that Data Scientist was even called the hottest job of the 21st century!) There are many new trends in these fields as it is a growing technology and changing every year. These range from the addition of data science to various new industries like marketing, finance, etc. to new innovations such as Decision Intelligence, Data as a Service, etc. 

Many of these innovations and trends impact careers related to data science and analytics. This is especially true as data science is a multidisciplinary field that also interacts with various other technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, the Internet of Things, etc. So let's check out what are the new data science and analytics career trends for 2021 that may also shape the career options in the future.

Common Data Science and Analytics Career Trends

 
There are many emerging trends that can shape your data science and analytics career in 2021 and in the future. Some of these are terms that you might have never heard before but may become common technologies in the future. After all, who had heard of Data Science 10 years ago?! There are also some of these trends that may die out in the future but that is not known right now.  So let's check out these popular career trends that may become popular in 2021 here:

1. Rise of Decision Intelligence
   There is no doubt that data science and its related fields like artificial intelligence are becoming more and more popular over time. In fact, any big companies you can think of, whether it's Google, Facebook, Apple (Even Netflix!) all use these technologies heavily. But in the future, many more companies will adopt decision intelligence. This means using the data and advanced methods like machine learning to obtain insights and make decisions based on those insights. It is estimated that more than 33% of organizations will use decision intelligence, whether they are tech companies or not.

2. The popularity of Data Stories
   Data dashboards are extremely popular within companies these days. They allow the decision-makers to understand the data with the help of different graphs and charts. But data stories are becoming even more popular than data dashboards and they may play a critical role in the future. These data stories are crafted as stories that take the viewers on a journey of the data and easily explain all the conclusions that are available from the data analysis. Unlike dashboards, the users don't need any detailed technical knowledge to understand these stories. 

3. Increase of Cloud Services
   More and more organizations are adopting data science and artificial intelligence these days but this technology is expensive and the data is not suitable for traditional storage models. Hence the increase in cloud Services! Data as a Service (DaaS) is becoming more and more popular these days because companies can use cloud storage to obtain actionable insights from their data even if they don't have data infrastructure in house. This is making data science more democratic and providing opportunities to small companies who would never be able to afford the cost of data analytics otherwise. 

4. Branching of Data Analytics
   When you think of data, what comes to mind? Mainly data is associated with rows and rows of numbers in the form of tables. But this is not the only type of data that companies possess. In fact, data also include audio, video, texts, customer feedback, etc. that is much more difficult to analyze. But soon enough, data analytics will branch from merely textual data to all the other forms of data. This is much more difficult to do but will also provide companies with a three-dimensional view of their data which they can analyze to obtain maximum profit. This is already used in Sentiment Analysis, which is a branch of artificial intelligence used to analyze the general sentiment from the data.

Different Industries that are Using Data Science and Analytics

 
Now, these are some general trends in Data Science and Analytics that will be observed in 2021 and the coming years. However, there are many ways in which Data Science is changing the shape of different industries like marketing, finance, etc. Given enough time, Data Science might be a part of all the industries in the world, not just tech! So let's understand the role of this technology in different industries.

1. Marketing and Retail
   Data Science already plays a huge role in marketing and retail. The most basic thing that almost every company uses is marketing and retail dashboards that visualize the data to see the hidden patterns and trends. Data Science and Machine Learning are also very useful for customer analysis wherein customer data is collected to understand the demographic of customers, the products that are popular with different types of customers, their likes and dislikes, and how to market a particular product to a section of customers. 

2. Web and Social Media Analytics
   The internet and social media are a treasure trove of data! Google alone processes around 20 petabytes of data every day (That's approximately 1 followed by 15 zeros) Companies can use the web and social media analytics to obtain data about their customers and feedback on their performance which can be used to improve their bottom line. Sentiment analysis is a great example of this where companies can obtain their customer reviews from the internet or social media and to understanding the sentiment of the customers towards the company. 

3. Supply Chain and Logistics
   Supply Chain and Logistics may sound boring but it is a critical aspect for companies. Can you imagine Amazon working if their system for transporting products from point A to point B crashed? No! Therefore, Data Science and Analytics is an extremely important part of the Supply Chain and Logistics that companies can use for Inventory Management, Procurement Analysis, Inventory Classification, etc. For example, data analytics algorithms can be used to understand the correlation between demand and supply for companies and create methods to increase sales by always ensuring in-demand items are available.

4. Finance and Risk Analytics
   FinTech is a technology trend that is becoming more and more popular with time. It involved finance companies using cutting edge technology like Data Science and Artificial Intelligence to improve in areas like risk analytics, fraud detection, algorithmic trading, etc. Many big banks and finance companies use Data Science to analyze their large store of data to optimize their risk scoring models and decrease their risks. This data can include financial transactions, lending schemes, interest rates, customer interactions, customer trustworthiness, etc.

How to Leverage these Data Science and Analytics trends in 2021?

 
As you have seen, there are various new Data Science and Analytics trends emerging in 2021. You can leverage them to learn more about Data Science and improve your career using the data science courses offered by GreatLearning in collaboration with The University of Texas. These programs will teach you right from the basics of Data Science such as Python, Business Statistica, and Data Visualization to various techniques of Machine Learning such as Supervised and Unsupervised algorithms. You will also get direct domain exposure by doing projects relating to Data Science in different industries like Marketing and Retail, Web and Social Media Analytics, Supply Chain and Logistics, and Finance and Risk Analytics. Some of these projects include Facebook Comments Prediction, Retail Sales Prediction, Insurance Data Visualization, etc.