According to statistics collected by the job site Dice.com, the demand for data processing skills – NoSQL, Apache Hadoop, Python, etc – has hit an “all time high.” Dice claims that among the skills most sought after, NoSQL experts with experience in unstructured data systems like MongoDB is leading the way — with a 54 percent increase since last year. Apache Hadoop and Python also saw an increase in demand with 46 percent and 16 percent year-over-year gains respectively.

In conjunction with Dice’s statistics, Indeed.com provided details on their findings about which big data skills are most in demand. MongoDB is the most commonly mentioned of the NoSQL variants in job listings, with 4,979 entries as of yesterday. Couchbase, Redis and CouchDB were trailing marginally behind as the most common NoSQL variants.

Both job websites also noticed a major surge in “big data” related jobs, with a 46 percent increase year-over-year. Expertise in SaaS and cloud were up too, showing 20 percent and 27 percent increase respectively. “Dice claims one side effect of a rise in cloud-based analytics is a growing demand for employees with multiple skills in this category — for example, both Hadoop and cloud storage.”

In an interview with InfoWorld, Michael Rappa commented on the rise of big data jobs in 2012:  “big data isn’t a new specialty or suite of tools we have to train people into, as much as it’s a new organizational reality that everyone will need to adjust to occupationally…It would be valuable to develop interdisciplinary curricula around the emerging concept of ‘data science’ as a way of blending elements of math and statistics and computer science.”

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