New Skills, New Jobs
For Ryan Kapaun, sometimes a single piece of information means the difference between solving a crime or not.
As the law enforcement analyst for the Eden Prairie Police Department in Minnesota, Kapaun has a lot of information to sift through; police reports, interviews, court data, and public records often provide important clues. But just having the data isn’t enough—he needs to know what to do with it.
“I’m just trying to find one piece of data that will lead to the next, and so on, until I can paint a picture of who did it, what they did, and where they might be,” he says. “The big issue is just figuring out what data is good, what is bad, and what is pertinent to the task you are doing right now.”
Kapaun is one of many at the forefront of a new field: that of the big data-enabled professional. Across the U.S. workforce, more jobs in industries from criminal justice to marketing to the sciences are looking for people who can use large, diverse quantities of data to ask, research, and answer questions.
And there’s no sign that this is just a momentary blip on the economic screen. A 2012 survey by McKinsey & Company found that the “United States alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with analytical expertise” to fill the jobs created by big data.
But increasing opportunities in data-heavy fields have also revealed weaknesses in the talent pipeline. Undergraduate programs have been criticized for not preparing enough students for the opportunities in data- and analysis-heavy fields that await them. Efforts are further complicated because the skillset of a big data-enabled professional has yet to be clearly defined.
Defining the field
EDC’s Oceans of Data Institute (ODI) is taking a lead role in shaping this emerging field. At a two-day event in August, ODI gathered experts from across the big data workforce to define the specific skills, attitudes, and behaviors required of big data-enabled professionals.
“We are trying to identify those skills that are basic and central to working with big data, no matter the application, no matter the industry,” said ODI Director Ruth Krumhansl.
The 11-person panel brought Kapaun together with other experts from many different industries. A data scientist from Microsoft sat next to an earth scientist from CalTech; an expert in bioinformatics chatted with a university provost.
In a discussion facilitated by EDC’s Joyce Malyn-Smith and Joe Ippolito, the panel completed a preliminary framework that detailed the tasks they do every day and the knowledge and skills required to do them. That framework is now under peer review and is expected to be released in October 2014.
Krumhansl expects that once it is finalized, the formal report will help both K–12 schools and institutions of higher education develop programs that prepare students more successfully for lives in a data-heavy world. She notes that more and more jobs are requiring data analysis skills, even beyond the tech sector: teachers, for example, are increasingly using data to drive decisions. The same is true for people in the health care fields.
“I hope that these recommendations will spark conversation about basic, fundamental data skills,” she says. “It’s really important that students start developing these skills and abilities early in their schooling.”
Developing an occupational profile is a first step at identifying those skills. It also helps quantify the skillset of those already in the big data workforce.
“That profile helps give a more concrete label for what I am doing every day,” says Kapaun, who holds a bachelor’s degree in communications. He also notes that as his police department relies more heavily on data, the tools he uses as an analyst have changed—necessitating a lot of on-the-job training.
But in the end, it’s all about solving a puzzle. Kapaun says that more than crunching numbers, it’s his critical-thinking skills, flexibility, and curiosity that have helped him succeed.
“There are always more questions to be asked and more answers to be found,” he says.