The Obama administration may be trying to curtail the collection of private data by online companies with its Online Privacy Bill of Rights, but the reality is that the accumulation of massive amounts of personal data is here to stay. In fact, if recent trends are any indication, the flood of data is only going to get bigger.
A lot bigger. Experts estimate that data is growing at 50% a year, more than doubling every two years.
That’s a lot of data. And most of it is totally unstructured.
And that’s where data experts come in. Who are they? They’re the special subset of computer techies who have a strong quantitative background and are in love with data. These are data gurus who know how to make sense out of the piles of information collected by web browsers, social networking sites, company inventory and customer lists, shipping manifests, supplier statistics – you name it.
According to the McKinsey Global Institute, a global management consulting firm, the U.S. needs somewhere in the range of 140,000 to 190,000 workers with deep analytical expertise as well as another 1.5 million data-literate managers to make sense of the rivers of data that most private companies, government agencies, academic departments, and healthcare organizations need to ford on a daily basis.
So if you’re looking for a career with a solid future, think data. In today’s world, numbers are hip; statistics are the new cool.