Tech looks to analytics skills to bolster its workforce

While engineering remains a critical asset, the rise in cloud and XaaS services has affected computer and hardware roles such as server administrators, computer hardware support technicians, and professionals who work on the hardware side of router and storage management.2 The COVID-19 pandemic has hit electrical and hardware design engineering roles harder than others in the tech industry.3 By contrast, even as the pandemic was worsening business conditions in spring 2020, tech majors' job openings for data analyst, data engineer, and data architect roles continued to trend high.4 Tech companies have long been at the forefront of attracting professionals with advanced analytical skills,5 and since 2014, tech recruiters have particularly targeted professionals with math and statistical skills, looking to harness their ability to study and analyze data to help solve real-world business issues.6 The race to AI has accelerated the crunch, as the top Silicon Valley companies have ramped up their workforce aggressively, focusing on advanced analytical skills such as ML, natural language processing, data engineering, and data visualization and image processing.7 Demand for data scientists and ML and AI specialists began surging in 2016.8 Tech companies continue to ramp up data scientist and data analyst talent.9