Science graduates trump engineers as data analytics gains currency

With the rise of analytics and big data, demand for science especially from streams such as Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Statistics and economics graduates is booming.

Be it IT services companies or Big Four consultancies providing such services, plain vanilla science graduates and economics students are being preferred over engineers for their number crunching abilities for analytics roles.

According to IT staffing firm Teamlease, fresher level salaries for economics or statistics graduates range from Rs 4-7 lakh per year, compared with Rs 3.5 lakh for engineering graduates for analytics jobs. At the middle level, pay cheques range from Rs 12-15 lakh per year.

"We are seeing more BSc graduates being preferred for data analytics roles because they have those required skills. Hiring is more off-campus than on campus," said Sangeeta Gupta, senior vice-president at industry body Nasscom.

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An internal survey by Nasscom last year revealed that, excluding BPOs, about 5-6% of the industry headcount was from non-engineering fields. "And that percentage is growing," said Gupta.

Among the top IT firms, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro run programmes exclusively to hire and train BSc and MSc graduates. The rising demand for data professionals can be gauged by the fact that over 1,00,000 new positions for data analysts and researchers are expected to be created by next year, according to Alka Dhingra, assistant general manager at Teamlease.

The demand for such graduates is driven by the pace at which big data and analytics is booming. Research firm IDC recently forecast that the global big data technology and services market will grow at a 26.4% compound annual growth rate to $41.5 billion through 2018, or about six times the growth rate of the overall information technology market.

While BSc candidates are preferred for more entry-level jobs, the middle and higher level hires working in the field are increasingly coming from statistics and economics backgrounds.

The industry is looking at "somebody who understands data and technology," said Sudipta Ghosh, PwC's India data and analytics partner. In the past, consultancies like PwC would hire engineers, MBAs or chartered accountants for such roles, but now they are increasingly looking to hire people from sciences backgrounds with strong data interpretation skills.

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People working as analysts also say demand has risen. "I am constantly being headhunted (in the UK, and) also internationally. I've heard that it's quite the same in India," said Veronica (name changed), a Bsc Statistics at St Xaviers College, Mumbai who then studied at the London School of Economics and now works as an insight manager at a global analytics company and is based in London.

"If education was more flexible in India, I'd have studied biology and maths to use stats in medical/health analytics," she explained.

What's even more interesting is that companies are also looking at BSc graduates for roles such as infrastructure management, squeezing out the engineering freshers who typically held these roles. At this level, the BSc hires are cheaper, and get paid in the Rs 1.8-2 lakh range.

"The industry is moving to more skill-based hiring, rather than just engineers for everything," said Nasscom's Gupta. Another reason why science graduates are preferred is because they possess the "right mindset for learning on the job skills, they don't drop out as often, are not finicky about what location they get," said an industry source.