Data analytics: It’s not just for data scientists anymore. According to a new report (PDF) from the Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA), more than half of the American workforce (that’s 74.3 million people) works with data in some way. Some 10.3 million of those workers rely on “fairly sophisticated” software to perform data analytics. The ESA defines a “data job” as one in which an employee:

• Analyzes data or information
• Processes information via coding or categorizing
• Interacts with computers

“We classify data occupations as those for which the average importance score for the three selected work activities is 80 or above” on a scale of 1-100, according to the report. Jobs that meet such criteria include financial analysts, statisticians, environmental engineers, budget analysts, Web developers, police dispatchers, and many, many more. Check out the latest analytics jobs. Over the past decade, the report added, data jobs have grown four times faster than the baseline for the private sector. Those jobs are lucrative, paying $40 dollars an hour on average (some 68 percent more than the average private-sector job). But that sort of payoff also demands an education: two-thirds of workers in the “top data occupations” have at least a bachelor’s degree. Washington, D.C., Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Connecticut boast the highest concentrations of data-focused jobs. The report offers up a whole plethora of stats on data workers, making one thing very clear: Whatever your job, it’s likely that analytics will play a growing role in it. Image: ESA