Demand for R jobs on the rise, ctd

Earlier this month, we looked at the trends in the job prospects for data analysts with expertise in R and SAS, by looking at the number of job postings that mention each software package. Because R's single-letter name makes it hard to search for, and because SAS is used for many other things besides data analysis, I coupled the search with the term "statistics". But whatever related terms you use (data mining, predictive, analysis or modeling as shown below) the overall picture is the same: there number of jobs calling for R are rapidly increasing, while SAS jobs have been on the decline for a couple of years now.

Bob Muenchen, the instructor of the Managing Data with R online course, has written a regular series on the growth of R at r4stats.com. He also recently looked at job trends for R and other statistical software packages at indeed.com, but used a slightly different methodology. Noting that job ads often call for skills in a range of software packages (for example, this ad for a Game Analytics Specialist at Activision calls for "Proficient use of statistical analysis tools, such as SAS, R, SPSS"), he looked at relative rates of jobs calling for R and another statistical software package, compared to SAS with other packages. As before, jobs calling for R are rising rapidly, while the number of jobs calling for SAS declines:

You can read the full details of Bob's analysis and also see comparisons of trends in R jobs with Stata and SPSS at the link below.

r4stats.com: Trends in the Analytics Job Market