Which jobs have the best career opportunities?
Glassdoor recently analyzed its employee reviews and found 25 jobs that supposedly provide an optimal combination of open jobs and competitive salaries. Surprisingly, technology jobs don’t dominate this list, despite the tech industry’s record-low unemployment and traditionally high salaries.
Indeed, “Salesforce Developer” was the top technology job on the career opportunity list, placing second behind “Tax Manager” (which shows it’s lucrative to wrestle with other folks’ taxes). After that, “Data Scientist” placed seventh (with a “Career Opportunities Rating” of 3.9), while “Java Developer” hit ninth (also with a 3.9 rating). “Mobile Developer” sat in twelfth place (with a 3.8 rating), just ahead of “DevOps Engineer.” Here’s the top 15 for your reading pleasure:
Why did Salesforce developer rank so highly as a career option? On the most basic level, it’s clear that many companies rely on Salesforce services for tracking. Moreover, Salesforce is expanding rapidly via acquisition (it recently spent $1.57 billion on Tableau, which specializes in data analytics and visualizations), which means that its businesses will intersect with more and more tech professionals from a variety of disciplines.
The relatively high ranking of data scientist also makes sense, especially as more companies realize they need to analyze data for insights in order to actually implement effective strategies. However, there are also signs that companies are increasingly on the hunt for experienced data scientists who have the skillsets necessary to perform advanced number-crunching, while relatively new data scientists struggle to launch a career.
Earlier this year, Glassdoor suggested pay for data scientists shrunk 1.2 percent (year-over-year). “This is a continuation of a longer running trend—data scientist wage growth has been well below the national average for the last year,” said Glassdoor senior economist Daniel Zhao said at the time.
Meanwhile, a blog posting by Vicky Boykis, senior manager for data science and engineering at CapTech Ventures, suggested that an influx of new people looking for a career in data science might be leading to an oversupply of talent. “Based on my own participation as a résumé screener, mentor to data scientists leaving boot camps, interviewer, interviewee, and from conversations with friends and colleagues in similar positions,” she wrote, “I’ve developed an intuition that the number of candidates per any given data science position, particularly at the entry level, has grown from 20 or so per slot, to 100 or more.”
As this new list demonstrates, though, the hunger for data scientists—and the high salaries for the position—means that career opportunities abound for those with the right skills and experience. And that applies to tech jobs in general: while such roles are much in demand by employers, you need to come to the table with expertise they actually need.
