With ongoing uncertainty in the economy, many businesses are not expected to dramatically increase hiring in the IT department soon. There is one new position, however, that many companies will want to fill: Data scientist.

As businesses of all kinds amass escalating towers of information, the potential to use it to improve efficiencies, profits and innovation grows. People who can study data effectively will become ever more important, but exactly who those people are remains somewhat unclear. The necessary set of skills "go beyond many existing job titles and it's increasingly in demand," writes Ryan Kim in a post at GigaOm. It requires "someone who can obtain, scrub, explore, model and interpret data, blending hacking, statistics and machine learning."

The "low-hanging fruit" in many companies' databases has already been picked, and now businesses are seeking deeper insights, which require analysts with greater data savvy, Kim reports. From 2008 to now, the search for executives who have advanced data mining or analytics skills increased 200 percent, according to Katie Tucker, a senior partner at Korn/Ferry, a recruiting firm. New data warehousing gear and data management and processing software are giving companies new ways to collect and analyze data. 

"With the price of processing, storage and broadband dropping and data tools emerging, it's easier than ever for companies to wade into big data," Kim writes. "And as they do, they'll need more scientists to make sense of it all and show them the way."

For more:
- see Ryan Kim's post at GigaOm

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