Big Data is the buzzword in the Indian IT industry at the moment. But is there any essence behind this hype? I often get asked about career opportunities in Big Data field and so I though I will write this blog to give my views.

The first career option with big data is to become a Big Data Analyst. This is the most sought after job, and also for companies its hardest to find people for this position. For landing this kind of a job you will require three basic skillsets:

• The first skillset required is the Fundamental knowledge of what is Big Data and the associated technologies like Hadoop, HDFS, Hive, Pig, etc. You will also be required to have hands-on experience with these technologies. The company that hires you will expect that you look at the datasets that the company has and figure the best way to store and process the datasets so that analytics can be ran on it.The company might also have traditional data warehousing solutions that they might expect you to move to Big Data technologies. (If you are lacking in this field, our course “Processing Big Data with Apache Hadoop” is a perfect way to acquire this skill set)
• The second skillset is knowledge of analytics. Right from simple basics like finding mean, median, mode (class 5th stuff), all the way to what is decision trees, neural networks, what is training dataset vs. testing dataset, what is K-means algorithm, and how to use it to find useful information from datasets that are processed by Big Data technologies like Apache Hadoop. We are shortly launching a class on this, so stay tuned for more information.
• The third skillset is domain knowledge. This is crucial for data analysts. If you joining a banking company as a Big Data Analyst, there is a good chance that without the Banking industry domain knowledge you will have a hard time figuring out what kind of data analysis needs to me done. So you need to understand a domain really well, may it be banking, ecommerce, pharmaceutics, advertising, etc. And this comes with work-experience and time. I know many people that have succeeded even though they were new to a domain, but its an exception and not a norm.

With this three skillsets you are virtually guaranteed to be an asset to the company.

The other two kind of jobs in big data include:

• Big Data Developer
• Big Data System Admin

I plan to write more about thesejobs in the future. Do write your comments below and let me know of your views. You can also mail me your comments: bhavesh [@] cloudthat.in

To just see the kinds of job available in the real market, you can visit: https://jobsearch.naukri.com/big-data-jobs

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