In the previous year, Nasscom-Zinnov released a report of a huge talent demand and supply gap in the big data analytics (BDA) and artificial intelligence (AI). It is reportedly estimated that the job opportunities for BDA and AI in India is to upscale by 2,30,000. But the availability of fresh talents or university talent will be just 90,000.

“With the world moving towards being a data and analytics driven platform, to have a data scientist is highly important for each corporate,” says Kalyan Muppaneni, chairman and CEO of Pi Datacenters, an Andhra Pradesh-based IT & services firm that delivers enterprise cloud services and futuristic data centre.

“But to find relevant data scientists, with real world experience, is very difficult. This may be because data science and analytics is still not a curriculum in most universities,” he says.

A report by LinkedIn last year pegged a data scientist’s role as the fifth top emerging job in India. The demand for data scientists is increasing significantly across all types of companies- GCCs, startups, IT-BPM companies, and other enterprises. Additionally, an increase in global demand for these skills is also expected to reflect across organizations in India, the report says.

The talent dearth showcases two major factors including career learning programmes and ensuring adequate skills prior to fresh talent moves to the job sector.

Anand Narayanan, chief product officer at Edtech firm Simplilearn drops a statement that, the data and AI domain is growing rapidly. A large number of experienced professionals are upskilling themselves and this trend is set to continue for a while, since the skill gap shows no sign of being closed any time soon.

A Nasscom report recognizes mid-career professionals as an adjacent talent pool- a large segment of talent supply that can be trained to work on AI and big data analytics. “Talent adept in software development, databases, and other relevant skills, despite lacking direct AI and big data analytics capabilities, can be upskilled to the desired roles,” it says.

Prof Kamal Karlapalem, head of the data science and analytics centre at IIIT- Hyderabad, says firms like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are providing industry code for relieving the event and preparation of data science solutions. Education for knowledge science, he says, can move towards coaching on trade goods code, and domain comprehension for specialised analytics.