Deep learning and the German Data Science Job Market

Almost 2 years ago, I wrote a short post on the German data science market by analysing open position on the key job platforms; Stepstone, Monster and Indeed. Recently I received requests to update the post with fresh data.

So here it comes. To add a slightly different spin, I thought it would be interesting to see how widespread and prevalent the deep learning / AI trend shows up in the job market.

To get started, I scraped the number of available job openings from the sites: Monster, Stepstone and Indeed searching for the term “Data Scientist”.

To put the numbers in perspective, in the December 2015, I found 65 jobs on Indeed, 36 on Monster and 36 on Stepstone. As a first take-away; the data science market increased somewhere between 5 and 10 fold. The ~600 positions on Indeed are advertised by 254 companies, which is almost a 5 fold increase vs 2015.

In order to see how important deep learning is, I compare the number of open positions for the search term in relation to other data search terms. We see that there are 400 open positions with that keyword. Data mining or machine learning are more common by factor 2 respectively factor 4.5.

Looking at advertised methods, we see that it is always good to have some standard data preperation and statistic skills under the belt. Looking at the technology search terms, we see a hugh interest in spark (almost a 10 fold increase compared to the 2015 data.) What is espcially interesting here is that there are “only” 330 data engineer positions. Hence big data technologies are mentioned in a much wider range of job positions.

Finally, looking at programming languages and business intelligence tools we see that Java and Excel are still highly in demand.

Two years ago I concluded with stating: Given this analysis, I would conclude that Germany is not (yet) a hot market for data scientist. Both in terms of regional distribution as well as the low absolute and relative number of open positions suggests that the job market is not well developed.

Given the 5 fold increase in postions, I think that German companies finally realized that the digital transformation requires highly-skilled data-educated employees.