And job opportunities are booming!
Glassdoor published a report on Wednesday that indicated that even as retail stores close, the retail industry is gaining ground in software jobs. It found that the retail industry increased 7.5% to 13.9% of software job postings since 2012. This was the highest industry segment of all, and over information technology companies, which came in second at 8.8% of job postings. Glassdoor attributes the growth of software-related jobs to the surge of online retail being driven by Amazon and WalMart. Notably, the manufacturing industry came in third, posting 6.1% of software jobs, with a push for leaner and smarter processing.
Glassdoor predicted this uptick in software jobs last year, naming retail data scientist as a top 25 job for 2016. SAP’s extended supply chain executives stated that these hires would be critical, stating that, “It’s essential for not only collecting, managing and analyzing supply chain data, but also for garnering advanced predictive analytics to help executives make more intuitive, accurate and reliable decisions, allowing them to deliver goods and services ahead of the competition.” Retailers are searching for great candidates in this area, and they are hard to find because of the need for a mix of retail business acumen, technology skills, intuition and the math they need to bring to the role.
There are 2 succinct roles retail is trying to fill: the data engineer who gathers and collects the data, and the data scientist who takes value from that data and tries to understand the meaning of what the data is telling them. Because both roles need to be filled, retail typically tries to fill it with one person (extra difficult to find) or they outsource the jobs to other companies, like Accelerated Analytics. Accelerated Analytics can take the large volume of retail data and embed the analytics into usable reports that can be understood and acted on by people across the organization.
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