Struggling to recruit data scientists? Look to sociology and economics grads
Mark Ridley, CIO of recruitment website reed.co.uk, explains why looking in unusual places for data scientists can yield great rewards
Organisations struggling to find data scientists should look at sociology and economics graduates.
That's the opinion of Mark Ridley, CIO of recruitment website reed.co.uk.
"Today data science is a huge need," Ridley told Computing recently. "And we've been trying to understand how to deal with the lack of data scientists, but actually you've got a huge number of people trained in social science coming out of sociology and economics degrees who might make perfect data scientists," he argued.
"There are people who have been trained in statistics and may well be a bit geeky who may make perfect data scientists. Sometimes the richest ground is in being a little bit creative in where you find these people," Ridley added.
He explained that his organisation has seen success in taking people straight from these disciplines within academia to fill data science roles.
"I'm pushing to recruit people from social science backgrounds into UX [user experience] research," he said. "They might seem like completely different backgrounds but it's actually very similar because you're working with big, messy human data, and you're trained to deal with that.
"Because we were building a team from scratch, we wanted people with more experience, so initially we found people with a background in data science, who were often lecturing about data science in academia. But that's now given us the capacity to backfill some of those roles with people that haven't necessarily got that experience. We can look within our own team for people with social science disciplines, have an interest in stats and technology, and start training them up into data science as well."
He acknowledged however that recruiting the experts who will later be well placed to train others is difficult, and can be expensive.
"You'll probably pay more than you'd like because there aren't enough of these people to go around, but if you can be creative, and you can find people you can later train, then it's probably better to pay more to get people higher up the spectrum so they can then train people more junior.
"If you can find people with the capacity to learn, the willingness and the right attitude, then if they're numerate they can learn what's required."