We’ve heard the phrase ‘big data’ used again and again, sometimes accurately but also often to describe all manifestations of analytics and relational databases over the past few years.

Recently at CB Resourcing, we’ve seen an influx of clients asking about the talent market for candidates with data manipulation skills such as Python, R and SQL. More specifically candidates with strong business research and analysis skills who can use technology to make sense of large unstructured data sets within the context of a business research question.

Clients aren’t looking for programmers, it’s the inherent understanding of business research that is required to determine how to interrogate data sets that is valuable in a research team.

With the growing complexity of datasets available, visualisation is also becoming a key skill to have in your research team. For instance it’s incredibly valuable to have skills in house to develop interactive Tableau dashboards for Senior Partners for instance.

Whilst we’ve seen many of our consulting, banking and industry analyst clients embrace this technology a few years back, it’s been very interesting to more recently see the conversation popping up in other types of firm. Law firms, professional services and real estate companies are all good examples of this.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the industry grows this type of talent into research teams– it’s not so much about software tools but developing a data centric problem solving capability.