Data is essential for companies and is going to spell an era of innovation as companies attempt to balance privacy concerns with the need for more accurate data/targeting. The number one role of data in business is better targeting. Companies are determined to spend as few pounds on advertising as possible for maximum effect. This is why they are gathering data on activities, making changes, and then looking at the data again to discover what they have to do.

The market in turn has answered companies’ prayers by generating a number of tools available to manipulate, understand and extract data into useable information to guide organisations strategy in various areas.

The idea behind data analytics is clear-cut: Find patterns hidden in large amounts of data, train machine-learning models to spot these patterns and implement those models into production to automatically act upon them. Repeat if necessary. However, in reality it is difficult to bring data from different silos together and requires ETL and database skills with lots of cleaning and labelling the data for the machine learning training to take place. For these reasons, it remains a big challenge and will continue to drive demand in this skill/talent, with many specialists working as contractors. Data roles have seen an increase of 10-15% in average salary over the last 2 years.