The data business is booming, and so are the demands of government and industry to hire professionals who can make sense of their data.
The city of San Francisco established the role of chief data officer last year and created a data coordinator position for each department. Other states and cities — and the federal government — have followed suit. The White House hired its first chief data officer in February to help lead the administration’s open-data efforts and recruit talented data experts into government.
Roughly 1.6 million government employees are employed in data occupations, according to a new report by the Commerce Department’s Economics and Statistics Administration. Those jobs account for about 16 percent of the 10.3 million public and private sector jobs in which data is central to the work being performed. The report is based on 2013 figures, the most current full year’s worth of data.
