U.S. News and World Report’s guide to the best careers published this month lists data miner as one of a dozen “ahead of the curve” careers for 2009:
Data mining is a great career for people who would enjoy using statistics to unearth patterns in data, using ever more powerful software. Opportunities are particularly good if you also have business sense and the ability to tease out the information that bosses really want to know.
The impact of the recent economic downturn on data mining jobs appears to be limited. CareerBuilder.com, the U.S.’s largest online job site, has over 800 data mining related jobs—and nearly 1400 jobs in analytics—listed in the past 30 days. Although salaries for data mining analysts vary with education and experience, annual base pay for new recruits is frequently in the range of $80,000.