Too many data scientist positions, and not enough people to fill them – that’s the case in D.C. and the rest of the nation, where demand for data science talent far exceeds its supply.
Data scientist topped the list of LinkedIn’s 2019 Most Promising Jobs in the U.S., citing a year-over-year growth in job openings of 56 percent, and the Washington D.C. Economic Partnership reports that demand for data analytics is expected to increase by over 50 percent, to $203 billion, by 2020.
To help fill those desks, Flatiron School is launching a data science fellowship program at its D.C. campus.
The computer science education company says the area’s high concentration of education, healthcare and government entities demanding skilled data scientists made the District its obvious next target after launching a similar program in New York City.
The new opportunity is for techies with strong technical backgrounds, such as a Masters or PhD in STEM fields. In 15 weeks, students will gain the skills required of a well-rounded data scientist and its career services team will help them launch a career in the field. The first two cohorts will get a full scholarship to the program.
“We work with a number of employer partners to place graduates from our software engineering program, and have been asked about talent for data science,” said Flatiron DC campus director Josh Daniell. “The field is growing very rapidly, and our employer partners are struggling to keep up with demand.”
The most common role that Flatiron has placed New York program graduates into has been data scientist, along with some machine learning architects, engineers and data engineers.
Flatiron opened its D.C. campus, which so far has exclusively run software engineering programs, in March 2018.
“We’ve seen the rise of digitization in different industries – in D.C. there’s lots of education and healthcare – and also there are areas like political campaigns and public policy, so demand from D.C.-area employers has been increasing,” Daniell said.
“Like software engineering, data science is a portable skillset, so with the digitization of different sectors, they can often apply their skillset to their passion,” he said. “So we see people coming in with a wide range of backgrounds, either working with data or adjacent to data, that’s given them exposure and piqued their interest.”
The first D.C. data science fellowship cohort will start April 22 and accept up to 20 students. Applications opened three weeks ago. To date, Flatiron has trained and placed more than 1,000 computer science students.
