What:  the Harvard Business Review takes stock on the data scientist position and determines to what extent it has evolved since being identified as the sexiest position in 2012

Why it is important:  Department stores are among the industries trying to lure in data talents in order to improve their digital capabilities. Knowing where this position stands is key to understand what could be the most interesting for the promising candidates, as it was discussed during the 3rd CEO call in 2022.

Ten years ago, the Harvard Business Review called the data scientist position the sexiest job ever, given that the job was in demand from tech companies, but everything had to be built since it was relatively new. The HBR anticipated that such a position would be then extremely coveted by other companies, once the benefits of this new job become clear and the framework could be specified (at the time, candidates could come from experimental physics, astronomy, psychology, or meteorology)...

A decade later, the job is more in demand than ever (the demand as increased by 256% since 2019 and it is expected that data science will grow more than any other field until 2029).

However, the hurdles that were identified a decade ago have survived: data scientists spend most of their time cleaning and wrangling data (in spite of AI progress), they struggle with organizations which lack data-driven culture, and they are led to think that they can not make an impact in their organizations.

But all in all, the frame of the position has been specified, largely thanks to a growing data science-oriented educational offering, the fact that they are now part of organizations which tack their needs into account and provide support (ML engineers, AI specialists, analytics, data-oriented product managers, also due to the fact that the topic is so complex that it requires many different skills coming from various areas of specialization).

The HBR also expects the position to keep on evolving, due to the changes in technology and the fact that coding, which was a must have back in 2012, is now no longer essential to perform.

Is Data scientist still the sexiest job?