The 5 Most Important Skills You Need To Get a Data Job in 2021

Adam Shafi
10 min readJan 28, 2021

A data-driven approach to understanding technical skills in the UK market.

Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash

Introduction

This article uses a web scraped dataset to analyse text and find the most common skills in data-related jobs. I’m focusing on technical/hard skills for this article and will tackle soft skills later on.

For each of the 5 most common skills, I’m going to cover:

  • What is it?
  • What the Data Says
  • My Opinion
  • Salary
  • Learning

Basic Statistics

The dataset consists of 3,015 job titles including salaries.

The mean salary is £49,543.

The median salary is £44,000.

These seem quite high and we’ll discuss why later on.

Table of Contents

Methodology

Data Collection

This dataset has been scraped from Indeed.co.uk using Python’s BeautifulSoup package. The data was scraped in November and December 2020.

  • The search terms used were a range of data-related roles, Indeed also returns a wide range of roles e.g. ‘Data Analyst’ would also return ‘Data Scientist’ roles.
  • Duplicates have been removed using the job title, description and location.
  • The data was filtered to only jobs containing salaries.
  • The titles and descriptions have been cleaned to remove common words such as ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘is’, etc.
  • Some cleaning of hard skills was done to group common misspellings together e.g. ‘PowerBI’ and ‘Power BI’.

Analysis

The most common words are not hard/soft skills and there is no definitive list of data-related skills. The lists…