Joblift began by classifying the 36,957 job advertisements published in the Big Data environment over the past 24 months by sector. Unsurprisingly, information and communication technology (ICT) advertised the most jobs with 16%, followed by industry with 12% of advertisements. In third to fifth place were the retail sector with 11%, finance and insurance with 9% and the media sector with 2% of job advertisements. In terms of the growth in job advertisements, this was most noticeable in the media and ICT sector: Here, advertisements increased by an average of 6% each month, whereas they rose by 5% in industry and by just 3% in the retail and finance sectors.

SMEs upgrade

An analysis of company size shows that large corporations are ahead when it comes to recruiting big data experts: 52% of companies advertising jobs have more than 1,000 employees. In contrast, organizations with up to 49 employees only published 18% of the vacancies, although according to the Federal Statistical Office, these make up around 98% of all German companies. Nevertheless, small and medium-sized companies appear to be increasingly upgrading when it comes to handling large amounts of data. Job advertisements in companies with up to 49 employees increased by an average of 4% each month, while they grew by 3% in corporations with 1,000 employees or more. However, medium-sized companies with 50 to 200 employees are following suit the most - although they only advertised 15% of jobs in the last two years, job growth here amounted to 7%.

Data protection at a glance

In Germany, restrictions related to data protection are often cited as obstacles to the intelligent use of data. In this context, experts recommend its early integration with regard to big data. Accordingly, Joblift analyzed the data protection jobs advertised in the area of big data during the period under review. There were only 245 data protection officers for the almost 37,000 jobs for data analysts. While the retail sector only hired one data protection officer for every 724 big data experts, this ratio was one to 380 in industry, one to 265 in ICT, one to 216 in the finance industry and one to 178 in the media sector. However, the energy sector has the strongest focus on data security: although it only advertised a total of 121 jobs for big data specialists, it also advertised five in the area of data protection, which represents a ratio of one to 24.

No turning away from relational databases

A second major challenge is the use of relational database systems, which do not allow the available data volumes to be sufficiently evaluated. In fact, the analysis does not yet indicate a move away from relational databases, which are subject to the accusation of limited scalability: 14,182 job advertisements, or 38% of all Big Data job postings, require knowledge of relational databases such as SQL. In contrast, there are 7,868 vacancies (21% of advertisements) that also or exclusively require experience in working with non-relational database systems. It can therefore be assumed that many companies are still working with traditional, less suitable database technologies.