93,500 Data Science Jobs Vacant in India: Top Recruiters and Salary Paid

A study on jobs and hiring trends in analytics and data science domains conducted by Great Learning reveals that over 93,500 data science jobs were vacant in India at the end of August 2020. The study provides a comprehensive view of the data science job landscape in 2020, including the impact that COVID 19 has had on the vacancies in the sector.

Top recruiters for data science jobs in India

The 10 leading organizations with the most number of data science jobs this year are dominated by the IT and KPO players such as:

• Accenture
• Mphasis
• Cognizant Technology Solutions
• Capgemini, Infosys
• Tech Mahindra
• IBM India
• Dell
• HCL
• Collabera Technologies

They are increasingly hiring for roles like Analytics Specialist, Data Scientist, Decision Science Manager, Business Analyst, Analytics Manager, Statistical Modelling, Statistical Analyst, Marketing Research Analytics, and Operations Analytics Manager. When it comes to the IT sector, almost 68% of the demand is getting generated by MNC IT & KPO Service Providers, the highest this year but have decreased from 74.6% at the start of the year. Jobs in captive centres in India which stated one of the highest analytics job requirements 3 years ago, have now fallen to 5.8% in August 2020.

Industry-wise demand for data science jobs in India

Despite the BFSI sector continuing to be the largest recruiter of analytics and data science talent(outside of IT), creating around 35% of all analytics jobs in the country, the contribution of the sector has been going down year on year from 41% in 2018 to 38.3% in 2019 and 35% in August 2020. Interestingly, pharma sector has seen an increase in the proportion of analytics jobs at 16.3%, an overall increase of 3.9% over the last year. This is due to the focus on developing vaccines and other cures for the COVID 19 virus. The hiring in the sector has also shown an upward swing owing to heightened demand and increased competition. Other sectors like E-commerce, Energy & Utilities, Media and Entertainment, Retail and Telecom have also shown a greater appetite for analytics talent this year.

Salary paid for data science jobs in India

The study further reveals that the median salary for data science professionals in India stands at Rs 9.5 Lakhs per annum in 2020 as per the listed job openings (the actual salary is generally higher than the listed salary). For those with more than a decade of experience, packages are in the range of Rs 25 lakhs to Rs 50 lakhs depending on the role and expertise.

Skills in demand

The demand for Python professionals continues to remain the highest among recruiters with almost 27% of the jobs requiring Python as the core skill. It is closely followed by Java/JavaScript that is witnessing a 22% demand. R comes third in the list at 10%, the same as last year. Among Dashboarding and BI tools, Tableau skills are most in-demand with 11% demand in August 2020, followed by Microsoft Power BI contributing 6.5% demand. With greater adoption of cloud platforms across enterprises, the demand for cloud solutions including AWS (15%), Azure Skills (9.7%), and Google Cloud (5%) continued to soar even during the lockdown.

City-wise demand

Bengaluru continues to create the maximum number of jobs, contributing around 23% of analytics jobs in India, a marginal increase from last year, followed by Delhi/ NCR at 20% and Mumbai at approximately 15%. Other popular metros like Hyderabad, Pune, and  Chennai witnessed marginal growth in the proportion of jobs in August 2020 over last year. Interestingly, the proportion of jobs advertised for Tier-II and Tier-III cities, has increased this year to 10.5% from 8.4% in January 2020. This is mainly because the outbreak has led to the adoption of remote working and hiring. This trend is expected to last till the second quarter of 2021.