The 2024 data job market has been rough—AI is on the rise, layoffs seem to be happening every week and interest rates are through the roof. It’s easy to be pessimistic about the data job market, especially if you’re struggling to land a job.

A lot of people ask what’s really going on in the data job market, but it’s hard to actually know.

There's a flood of opinions on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, but not many are backed by any evidence—you can’t trust them. And I could tell you what I’ve seen firsthand from mentoring 600+ students, connecting with folks on LinkedIn daily, and talking to experts in the field.

But that would be purely from my own experience—not backed by hard data. Instead, I’ll share some real, tangible job market data—raw numbers.

This data was collected by a company I was recently introduced to called Live Data Technologies. They track real-time employment data levering publicly available data. The company sells data and these rare insights to product builders, investors, talent teams, and top media outlets, but luckily for us they’ve agreed to make some of these insights freely available to benefit the data community. Special shout out to them, specifically Jason Saltzman.

Here are my top 5 takeaways:

🔥 Data Engineer roles are hot

👩‍💻 Data Analyst roles aren’t dying

🕰 Average tenure is 18 months

🛡 Data jobs are proving resilient

♾ Data hiring spans across all industries.

Let’s dive in 👇

1. Data Engineering roles are the fastest-growing roles

After a decade of “The Sexiest Job of The 21st Century” it looks like the Data Engineer title has over taken the Data Scientist. The role experience 30%+ growth in the last 5 years.

There could be varying reasons for this but one is undoubtedly the sexy promise of machine learning and data science is only achievable with foundations that are best laid by data engineers. If a data scientist doesn’t have easy access to data, the machine learning models can only perform so well.

Another potential reason is the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Similar to machine learning, AI models are only as smart as the data used to train them. And getting, transporting, and storing the vast amounts of data needed to make a good LLM is a task Data Engineers are well-fit for.

2. Data Analyst roles aren’t dead

Many have worried that due to the challenge economy & rise of AI, data analyst roles were dying. This data shows that growth has been fairly stagnant in the last 18 months.

But read that again, growth has been stagnant. This means there’s still 14% growth versus 2019. We aren’t seeing a decrease in data analyst roles—we’re still seeing a significant increase.

And I think this will continue for quite awhile. Data analyst provide valuable low-hanging, data-driven insight to companies at an affordable rate. It’s one of the most effective investments a company can make.

3. Average time at job is less than 2 years

What surprised me is that most data roles have an average tenure of less than 3 years! And specifically Data Engineer, Data Analyst, and Data Scientist tenure times are much closer to 18 months.

This is a trend I discussed with Data Engineer expert, Zach Wilson, on The Data Career Podcast. He talked about how job hopping every 18 months allowed him to grow from $30,000 to $500,000 in about 5 years.

Driven by increased demand for data professionals, job hopping has caught hold, and my guess is it continues in the future.

4. Data jobs are resilient

With the economy as tough as it is, being able to bounce back after a job loss or make a quick career move has never been more essential. Data Scientists, Data Engineers, and Data Analysts all show higher-than-average hiring rates compared to typical white-collar jobs.

While no job is completely layoff-proof, data roles tend to be more resilient than most.

5. Data hiring happens in every industry

Many job seekers judge the data job market based on big tech’s job news. And although Meta led in terms of Data Engineers & Data Scientists (a quick pivot from their 2022/23 layoffs), there are plenty of non FAANG companies hiring.

Banking, consulting, and manufacturing round up the Top 20 companies hiring in data. In fact, Capital One, Accenture, and Deloitte were the top 3 companies for Data Analyst roles.

Big tech isn’t the only field hiring data professionals. Remember that!

The State of Data in 2024

The actual state of data jobs isn’t as bad as many make it out to be. There’s still plenty of growth & jobs available—no need to catastrophic panic.

Thanks again to Live Data Technologies for sharing this data with us.

To learn more about their data and explore their FREE trials (weekly job change alerts and their company intelligence platform), check out: https://www.livedatatechnologies.com/products

And if you need help landing your first data job, check out The Accelerator