The recent White House report on big data has garnered a great deal of public attention, both for its strong support for big data as a “driver of progress” and for its highlighting of privacy concerns. The bottom line of the report: “Americans’ relationship with data should expand, not diminish, their opportunities and potential.”
However, the authors of the White House report paid little attention to one important economic topic: Big data as a jobs creator. Big data is creating a wide variety of jobs, from data analysts to software developers to the people who run the massive data warehouses that are essential to almost every large company these days. This jobs impact should be an important part of policy considerations about big data.
In this memo, we estimate the number of ‘big data’ jobs in the U.S. economy as of May 2014. We define a big data job as a computer and mathematical occupation that uses big data skills, such as data analytics or knowledge of big data programs such as Hadoop or Cassandra. We track these big data jobs using a want-ad methodology developed by South Mountain Economics LLC in a series of papers on App Economy employment and a forthcoming analysis of big data and medtech jobs in Great Britain.
We find that the United States now has about 500,000 “big data” jobs. Roughly 100,000 of these jobs are in California, and another 100,000 are in New York, Texas, and Washington. Table 1 lists the top ten states for big data jobs, as of May 2014.
