In 2020, for the first time since 2016, data scientist wasn’t rated as the top job in the
United States according to Glassdoor’s annual ranking. But come on, being number one for 5 years
in a row? In 2020, it was ranked third, being neck and neck with the top two positions – front-end
engineer and Java developer. This goes to show you that data scientist continues to
be an amazing career opportunity. In fact, the average data scientist job satisfaction
and salary reported on Glassdoor beat those of frontend engineers and Java Developers.
However, these two positions won the competition due to the greater number of job openings.
To be precise, there were around 6,500 data scientist job postings on Glassdoor in 2020,
which was more or less the same number as in 2019.
By contrast, the number of openings for front end engineers exceeded 13,000.
The data science field is becoming more competitive and supply is catching up to
demand. We can come to this conclusion judging by the constant number of job
postings year on year and the fact that the number of prepared candidates is increasing.
So, in this video, we’ll study the data scientist job market in the USA and will
aim to define several key aspects you need to take into account if you want to become a data
scientist in the United States: job application, salary, education and skills requirements,
years of experience, top industries, and locations with the highest number of job openings.
Let’s get started! First off, one of the key
country-specific factors to keep in mind when eyeing a career in the US are visas.
If you live outside the United States and want to work there, you generally must apply for a visa
from the U.S. Department of State (DOS), unless a visa is not required for people from your country.
You may visit DOS’ Travel Without a Visa page for more information.
This makes things troublesome for non-US applicants – it is difficult
to get an interview and be considered for a position if the company you’re applying for
isn’t convinced you’re the right person for the respective role.
As a rule of thumb, smaller companies tend to be more open to sponsoring foreign applicants.
And if you want to work for a larger corporation, you might explore the option of getting hired in a
different country and gradually communicate that you want to be transferred to the US.
It really depends on your home country and which company you want to work for – whether
it is a multinational enterprise or not. This will determine what kind of visa options you can rely
on. By all means, you should learn the basics about L, H1B, and TN visas depending on that.
That said, a visitor can be helpful for attending an interview at the very least.
Although nowadays people all over the world are more and more open to zoom meetings
and an initial introduction online. The next important topic we would
like to discuss is job boards. Junior candidates will find
plenty of suitable opportunities in popular websites like Careerbuilder, Glassdoor, Indeed,
Job2Careers, Monster, Nexxt, Resumelibrary.com, Snagajob, Ziprecruiter, and of course LinkedIn.
In addition, it’s great if you can keep an eye on industry-leading blogs such as
KDnuggets and subscribe for email newsletters such as datascienceweekly.org.
Very well. How about compensation?
What is the salary you can expect if you manage to become a data scientist in the US?
After all, many people are excited by this career path in this country
because it is among the highest-paying opportunities in the entire job market.
As you probably know, Glassdoor is the best place to see some actual salary data reported by
people working in the industry. The average data scientist salary in the US is $113,309 per year.
This figure is based on a pretty large sample - 6,606 salaries. The range Glassdoor provides is
very wide, though. Data scientist salaries in the US start from around $83k and could reach $154k.
Which companies pay the most? The highest salaries shown on Glassdoor
are paid by Cisco and AirBnB while the lowest was reported at Booz Allen Hamilton.
How about education? Which are some of the best universities offering a Master in Data
Science degree in the States? According to Forbes columnist
and fellow instructor in the 365 Data Science program Bernard Marr,
the top 3 data science Master’s programs in the world are based in the US and are:
MIT – Master of Business Analytics Stanford: MsC in Statistics: Data Science
Carnegie Mellon – Master of Computational Data Science
Besides these programs, there are a few others that deserve an honorable mention, too:
Harvard’s Master of Science in Data Science University of Washington's Master of
Science in Data Science The University of Texas at
Austin's Master of Science in Business Analytics. But, of course, you can become a data scientist
even if you do not graduate from a target school. Truth be told, it’s mostly about your skills.
Let’s take a look at the most popular programming languages in the US for that matter.
What are the top programming languages for data science in the US?
We studied several hundred data scientist profiles on LinkedIn and saw that Python tops
the list. 29.6%. of data scientists in the US use it as their primary coding language.
R comes in second with 22.8%. SQL is number 3 with 22%. And Java is a distant fourth with 5.2%.
In another study, we researched 1,170 job postings in the US to see things from the
employer’s perspective. This second study showed a similar picture – 32% of job posts
mentioned Python, 25% R, 22% SQL, and 5.6% Java. So, we can conclude that Python is the most
popular programming language for data science in the US and R comes in second. No surprises there.
What about the skills US employers required? The most frequently mentioned ones are:
Machine learning Statistics
Python programming Data analysis
Algorithms Computer science
Data visualization Statistical modelling
Predictive modelling, and Statistical analysis system
In terms of popular machine learning techniques, we have:
Deep learning Clustering
NLP Predictive modelling
TensorFlow Neural Networks
Scikit-learn Keras
Decision trees CNN
Supervised machine learning Support vector machine
RNN, and Computer vision
And if you’re looking for one single place to master all these skills, we’ve got you covered.
We developed the ‘3-6-5 Data Science Program’ to help people of all backgrounds
enter the field of data science. We have trained more than 500,000 people around the
world and are committed to continue doing so. If you are interested to learn more,
you can find a link in the description that will also give you a special offer on all of our plans.
Ok. Great. At this point, you’re probably wondering:
“How many years of experience does the typical data scientist have in the US?”
Let’s take a look. 20% had more than 5 years of experience on the job. 33% have worked as
a data scientist for 3 to 5 years. Another 22.6% have between 2 and 3 years. 15% between 1 and 2;
and 8.5% started in the last twelve months. In terms of employment by industry,
we have Technology and IT, which outweigh the rest of the sectors significantly – almost 72%
of US data scientists in our LinkedIn sample were employed in Tech firms.
Finally, we examined the States in which we saw the highest number of data scientist job
postings – here is a nice visualization, which shows that California, Virginia,
Washington, and New York top the list. We certainly hope that this video would
be helpful to anyone who wants to become a data scientist in the US. Remember, knowing where you
want to get is the first step to getting there. If you enjoyed this video, don’t forget to hit the
“like” button and share it with your friends. And if you’d like to become an expert in all things
data science, subscribe to our channel. Thanks for watching and good luck!