Ten Key Skills for Landing a Big Data Job

Federal agencies and private sector companies alike are finding big data talent is in short supply. A recent study by the Government Business Council (the research arm of Government Executive Media Group, Nextgov's parent organization) and Booz Allen Hamilton found that while most federal managers are optimistic about promise of big data, many lack the skills to understand and use it effectively.

Now, a look inside Dice.com’s new Open Web sourcing tool reveals 10 skills hiring managers are searching for in big data talent. Those skills are all in combination with Hadoop, an open-source software framework that supports the processing of large amounts of unstructured data.

Hiring managers by a large margin are looking for professionals who have a combination of Hadoop and Java skills. That’s not too surprising given that Hadoop is a Java-based framework, the report states.  

Professionals with Hadoop and NoSQL experience also are in high demand, so much so that they are pulling in more than $100,000 annual salary on average, Dice found.

Other top skills sought by hiring managers in combination with Hadoop were: Developer, Map Reduce, Pig, Linux, Python, Hive and Scala. The search for skills is sure to change, however, as big data reaches its full potential. 

“Even with the above average compensation, the demand for this talent is in its infancy,” the report states. “Gartner predicts that nearly two million technology jobs will be created in the U.S. by 2015 thanks to the data economy, but warns not all the jobs will be filled due to shortages of talent.”