Proposed by Robert B. Cohen, PhD, Senior Fellow, Economic Strategy Institute, March 7, 2018
We have developed a classification of three groups of emerging digital occupations:
1. Data analytics – data scientists and jobs in data governance, predictive analytics, process management, and data center functions.
2. Software development and deployment – jobs with skills in software engineering, DevOps, Docker/Containers, microservices and serverless computing.
3. “Intelligence” for analytics, computing and networks – jobs in artificial intelligence and machine learning, business intelligence, cybersecurity, and network virtualization.
The skills needed for these jobs are shaped by firms’ perceived greater value in the data they collect from their web-based and internal operations. It is now more critical to capture and analyze this data in “real-time”. This insures that unwanted intrusions do not persist and cause operational problems. Firms also want to know that new software programs are functioning properly.
This means that human judgement about how to act on information becomes critical. The demand for employees to monitor and respond to data, especially large data streams, is likely to expand demand for highly paid professionals. It will also provide jobs that help firms employ data for analysis. As firms increase their dependence on data, they will need to oversee and monitor complex systems for manufacturing, service delivery and analytics. These jobs will demand human judgement and new skills to support “data-related” functions in the modern firm.