Data Science & Analytics Job Market in Switzerland in 2019

Today, data science specialists are among the most sought-after in the labor market. Being able to find significant insights in a huge amount of information, they help companies and organizations to optimize the structure's work. 

The field of data science is rapidly developing and the demand for talent is changing. We use job offerings to analyze the current demand for talent. After performing a first analysis in 2017, this article provides an update and more details on job openings, roles, required skills, locations and employers. We collect data over the last month from Indeed through their API. Indeed aggregates job openings from various websites and therefore provides a good starting point for an analysis. 

Data science job offers in Switzerland: first sight

We collect job openings for the search queries Data Analyst, Data Scientist, Machine Learning and Big Data. At the time of writing, there were 458 vacancies in the field of data science listed on Indeed for Switzerland. Most likely, not all jobs are captured by Indeed. Nevertheless, the dataset offers clear and structured information that allow us to analyze the market.  In order to get a better idea of different job types offered in the market, we will analyse the required level of experience, the required skills as well as the geographical distribution in the country. The bar plot shows the different job titles. Senior Data Scientist and Data Scientist are the most common job titles in this area. However, many jobs are listed with a job specific title rather than a general one. 

Based on the job title,  we group jobs by the required experience level. The following plots points out that there is a high demand for experienced talents. More than 60% of job openings require middle-level specialists, while around quarter offers look for seniors. Interns and juniors make up less than 10% of the total number of vacancies.

Zurich is the Swiss data science center

In a second step, we analyze the regional distribution of jobs. Not surprisingly, Zurich offers most positions, followed by Basel, Geneva (Genf), and Lausanne. The distribution by seniority seems equally distributed among cities - generally there is a high demand for people with some years of on-the-job experience. The majority of job offers for interns and juniors are found in Zürich. Both senior and lead data scientists are in high demand in Zürich and Basel, on the second stage follow Geneva and Lausanne.

Strong demand for Python skills

Let’s review the demand for specific skills, namely the number of occurrences of skills.Python is clearly leading among the programming languages with more than 400 mentions followed by R, Java, Scala, JavaScript, and C/C++. AWS, Spark, and Azure are the top 3 big data technologie, while Tableau and SAS head the visualization and analysis tools.

Academia, Tech, Pharma and Finance hire data skills

There are about 260 companies in Switzerland offering jobs in the sphere of data science, that we captured in our dataset. Most of them belong to the IT, FMCG and pharmaceutical areas, as well as financial and digital spheres.

We extracted the top companies with the most job offerings, and here they are. The size of the company name represents the number of job offerings. 

Google, Siemens, and EPAM companies offer many data science jobs in IT and digital areas. Roche and Novartis are large pharmaceutical firms. 

Credit Suisse is a famous financial holding. There are also hiring agencies like Myitjob or Oxygen Digital Recruitment. Johnson&Johnson is a giant FMCG company. EPFL, University of Basel, University of Bern and other educational establishments are also among the top employers of data talents. myitjobs was captured in the analysis - but it is just a job website and was misclassified by Indeed. 

Summing up our analysis, we can see that there is substantial demand for individuals with experience, while fewer opportunities exist to acquire experience though entry positions or internships. Strong Python skills seem to be a must-have these days in the data science world. The domination of Python has amplified compared to 2 years ago when R or Matlab were mentioned more often.